Misrepresenting COVID-19: Lying With Charts During the Second Golden Age of Data Design

In this second golden age of data design, digital affordances enable the news media to share occasionally misleading charts about COVID-19. Examining data visualizations about COVID-19 highlights three ways that charts can mislead viewers: (a) by displaying inadequate data, (b) by manipulating scales and visual distance, and (c) by omitting contextual labels needed to fully understand a chart’s message. This article provides takeaways for technical communicators about including and displaying adequate data, representing numbers consistently, and humanizing COVID-19’s effects.

Download Full-text

Data visualization in Indian print media: a comparative study of English and Hindi newspapers

RUDN Journal of Studies in Literature and Journalism ◽

10.22363/2312-9220-2020-25-3-554-566 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 25 (3) ◽

pp. 554-566

Author(s):

Amit Kumar ◽

Poonam Gaur

Keyword(s):

Comparative Study ◽

Data Visualization ◽

News Media ◽

Data Sets ◽

Process Data ◽

Important Place ◽

Whole Process ◽

Use Of Data ◽

Data Journalism ◽

Data Visualizations

The advancing technology is affecting every aspect of life and journalism is also not untouched by this. Due to digitalization, huge amount of data is being generated and the continuous advancement of computer science has made it possible to extract meaningful information by storing and analysing this huge data. The term “data journalism” has become quite popular over the last decade. Analysing data sets, extracting newsworthy information from it and passing it on to the public is data journalism. Data visualization also has a very important place in this whole process. Data visualization is used to communicate information extracted from the data to the users in a clear, interesting and engaging way. The amount of data-based content has started increasing in the news media as well, so the importance of data visualization has also increased. The use of data visualization improves readers’ reading experience and also helps to better understand the data-based content. This preliminary study focuses on the use of data visualizations by English and Hindi newspapers in India. In this research, a comparative study of various aspects of the use of data visualizations in English and Hindi newspapers has been done. Content analysis with quantitative approach has been employed as the research method. This study reveals that there is a big difference in every aspect of the use of data visualizations in English and Hindi newspapers. English newspaper used data visualizations in a better way than their Hindi counterpart.

Download Full-text