Alberto Cairo | Nieman Journalism Lab

Articles by Alberto Cairo

Alberto Cairo teaches information graphics and visualization at the School of Communication at the University of Miami. He’s also director of the Visualization Program at UM’s Center for Computational Science. He is author of the books Infografía 2.0: Visualización interactiva de información en prensa (Alamut, Spain, 2008) and The Functional Art: an Introduction to Information Graphics and Visualization, published by PeachPit Press, a division of Pearson Education, in September 2012.

A year of uncertainty and confidence

“We’ll all grasp that a 15 percent chance of something happening isn’t 0 percent, as any seasoned Dungeons & Dragons fan can tell you. It’s roughly the equivalent of rolling a 1 — or any other single number — on a six-sided die.”

Communicating uncertainty to our readers

“After what happened in the presidential election, I think there is going to be a growing interest in how to communicate data better to the public — and in particular how to communicate uncertainty.”

March 9, 2016

The island of knowledge and the shoreline of wonder: Using data visualization to prompt exploration

“A graphic may tell you a compelling story, but it can also invite you to expand the shoreline of wonder in ways that its creators didn’t predict.”

Visualization goes mainstream

“There is an increased interest in data analysis, how to extract information from data to tell stories.”

July 9, 2014

Alberto Cairo: Data journalism needs to up its own standards

The data visualization expert argues that FiveThirtyEight and Vox have overpromised and underdelivered — and that they need to treat their data with more scientific rigor.