Data Visualizations

Data visualizations like charts, graphs, and annotated maps can be useful tools in the analytic journalist’s (or other information communicator’s) toolbox, as they enable the casual transmission of complex data in a form that’s often easy to grasp and understand at a glance. This information is also comprehensible to folks who wouldn’t necessarily grok the meaning of an array of numbers in a matrix or a collection of (seemingly undifferentiated) findings stored in a database.

Research from the tail-end of 2023, though, suggests that political information shared in this way can incidentally shape the beliefs of those ingesting the visualized data, and can even increase political polarization.