IDSC Visualization Director Alberto Cairo, PhD, was recently interviewed for the Royal Statistical Society magazine “Significance” about his new book and why bravery, reason, and anarchy are intrinsic to all the best data visualization.

After years working as data journalist in his native Spain, Dr. Cairo moved into education and is now the Knight Chair in Visual Journalism at the University of Miami, as well as director of visualization at its Frost Institute for Data Science and Computing. His blog “The Functional Art” delivers vital dispatches from the cutting edge of data viz and his X account is followed by more than 67,000 data viz/journalism experts and fans. The Art of Insight: How Great Visualization Designers Think is his fourth book.

Q: What aspects of designers’ thought processes were you really trying to understand and why, in The Art of Insight: How Great Visualization Designers Think?

A: The book focuses not so much on the work itself, but more on the people who produce the work and the motivations and values that lie behind the work that they do. It is, in comparison to my previous books, a shift of perspective. More and more throughout the years . . .  Read the full article here or listen on YouTube:

SOURCE: Tarran, Brian. 2023. “The many ‘dialects’ of data visualization: Alberto Cairo and ‘The Art of Insight.’” Real World Data Science, August 1, 2023.