No matter what your actual job title, you are-or soon will be-a data worker.

Every day, at work, home, and school, we are bombarded with vast amounts of free data collected and shared by everyone and everything from our co-workers to our calorie counters. In this highly anticipated follow-up to The Functional Art-Alberto Cairo's foundational guide to understanding information graphics and visualization-the respected data visualization professor explains in clear terms how to work with data, discover the stories hidden within, and share those stories with the world in the form of charts, maps, and infographics. In The Truthful Art, Cairo transforms elementary principles of data and scientific reasoning into tools that you can use in daily life to interpret data sets and extract stories from them.

The Truthful Art explains:

. The role infographics and data visualization play in our world

. Basic principles of data and scientific reasoning that anyone can master

. How to become a better critical thinker

. Step-by-step processes that will help you evaluate any data visualization (including your own)

. How to create and use effective charts, graphs, and data maps to explain data to any audience

The Truthful Art is also packed with inspirational and educational real-world examples of data visualizations from such leading publications as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Estado de São Paulo (Brazil), Berliner Morgenpost (Germany), and many more.

Alberto Cairo is the Knight Chair in Visual Journalism at the School of Communication of the University of Miami (UM), where he heads specializations in infographics and data visualization. He's also director of the visualization program of UM's Center for Computational Science, and Visualization Innovator-in-Residence at Univisión. Cairo is the author of the books Infografía 2.0: Visualización interactiva de información en prensa, published exclusively in Spain in 2008, and The Functional Art: An Introduction to Information Graphics and Visualization (New Riders, 2012.) Over the past two decades, Cairo has been director of infographics and visualization at news organizations in Spain and Brazil, in addition to consulting with companies and educational institutions in more than 20 countries. You can find Cairo at www.thefunctionalart.com or on Twitter, where he is @albertocairo.

Preface: It All Begins With a Spark

Introduction: The Island of Knowledge and the Shoreline of Wonder

PART I: FOUNDATIONS

Chapter 1: What We Talk About When We Talk About Visualization

Chapter 2: The Five Qualities of Great Visualizations

PART II: TRUTHFUL

Chapter 3: The Truth Continuum

Chapter 4: Of Conjectures and Uncertainty

PART III: FUNCTIONAL

Chapter 5: Basic Principles of Visualization

Chapter 6: Exploring Data With Simple Charts

Chapter 7: Visualizing Distributions

Chapter 8: Revealing change

Chapter 9: Seeing Relationships

Chapter 10: Mapping Data

Chapter 11: Confidence and Significance

PART IV: PRACTICE

Chapter 12: On Creativity and Innovation

An Epilogue on What Lies Ahead