An interview in 'Significance' magazine

Talking about 'The Art of Insight', the “rules” and “dialects” of visualization, and many other subjects

If you’re subscribed to Significance, the magazine of the Royal Statistical Society, you may have seen an interview with me in the most recent issue. I went in-depth into the topics I covered in The Art of Insight, and expand beyond them. The interview is an almost literal transcript of several portions of this conversation I had months ago with Brian Tarrant (if you prefer to read rather than to listen to it, here it is):

This is, I believe, the most interesting part:

Brian Tarran
What you’re saying about the importance of still reading these kinds of texts, where the rules – again, in inverted commas – are set, the importance of doing that, that kind of reminded me of like in my, in my own world of, you know, the written word, people like James Ellroy, the author of American Tabloid, you know, about understanding the rules of grammar so that you know how to break them for effect and for impact and things like that. So I can see how that applies to data visualization.

Alberto Cairo
It is, yeah, that’s sort of like already has become a cliche, right: learn the rules, so you can break them. I think that that is valuable. But at the same time, I think that we need to go beyond that and say, there are really no rules. I mean, there are a few things that could be considered rules. For example, we know that, you know, if you want to compare numbers, a bar graph is usually superior to a pie chart, for example. We know that, there is empirical evidence behind that, so you can sort of like derive a principle out of that, right? But beyond those very basic things, there are really not many rules. What there are is a lot of conventions, inherited conventions, right, that historically have developed and we have– we have inherited. So we could say, you know, it’s good to learn the conventions. It is still good to learn about perception and cognition to guide your decisions. But after you do that, all that matters is the choices that you make with the knowledge that you have, and with the guesses that you can make. Right? So it’s not that you’re breaking the rules, you’re creating your own path, based on the inherited knowledge that you have under your belt.