Welcome to the February 2023 chapter newsletter. 

Forgive the repetition, but I couldn’t resist one more selection from that Nordic Folk Songs album I shared in January. Uti var hage (In our meadow) is another Swedish folk melody and the final track on the album. It’s a fitting conclusion to an exquisite World music record that opens like a military march and climaxes like Valkyries riding to heaven. 

Let us know what you think, and remember, you can also read this newsletter on the chapter website. You can find previous newsletters on the website as well. 

In this issue:

CHAPTER NEWS

• President-Elect, Programming Chair, CAC Rep positions currently open! See details below. 

• Join our AMWA North Central LinkedIn Community! Link here. 

CHAPTER EVENTS

• Book club meetings – next one on April 24, 2023 

FEATURES 

• Book Club Notes: How Charts Lie by book club lead, Paul W. Mamula, PhD

CHAPTER NEWS

Volunteers needed for President Elect, Programming Chair, CAC Representative

The AMWA North Central chapter is looking for a new President-Elect, Programming Chair and CAC Representative. Please consider volunteering! More information below. 

AMWA North Central is a volunteer-based organization. If members don’t take an active role, the chapter will cease to function, and members will lose access to programming, news, and networking opportunities. Consider taking your turn to lead (or join) a committee or serve as a chapter officer. If members don’t take an active role, the chapter will cease to function, and members will lose access to programming, news, and networking opportunities. Consider taking your turn to lead (or join) a committee or serve as a chapter officer. Please submit your interest or nominations for any of the above positions to bod@list.amwanorthcentral.org. 

• President-Elect: We are seeking a President-Elect for the 2023 term. This position is critical to our status as a chapter!  Without a volunteer to fill this vital position, we will not be able to continue as a chapter. Please volunteer! As President-Elect, you will attend the monthly AMWA NC chapter board meetings, take minutes, and chair the meeting if the president is unable to attend. Other duties may be assigned by the President or Board on an ad hoc basis. 

• Programming Committee Chair: The Program Committee Chair is responsible for organizing AMWA events throughout the year, including identifying topics of interest and recruiting speakers. This is an important role in AMWA and is valuable for both member engagement and education. Please submit your interest or nominations. 

• CAC Representative: We are looking for a new Chapter Advisory Council (CAC) Representative. The CAC Rep attends all meetings of the CAC, either held in person at the annual AMWA National meeting or by conference call. The CAC Rep then communicates all concerns and questions from chapter leaders and members to the CAC.

Not ready or able to lead a committee? All of our committees invite members to share ideas and keep the workload light. 

In addition to keeping our group viable, volunteering with AMWA is a great way to network with your fellow members. It’s also a good way to fortify your C.V. with an extra line showing how you give back to your profession! If you can volunteer a few hours a month to help, please send a message to bod@list.amwanorthcentral.org. 

EVENTS

Next book club: April 24, 2023

The Illusion of Evidence-Based Medicine: Exposing the Crisis of Credibility in Clinical Research by Jon Jureidini and Leemon B McHenry. The book presents a detailed account of two influential clinical studies that seriously misrepresented the drugs’ efficacy and safety. The drugs, paroxetine and citalopram, are used for pediatric and adolescent depression. The book argues for reevaluating the relationship between medicine and the pharmaceutical industry. 

FEATURES

Book Club Notes: How Charts Lie

By Paul W. Mamula, PhD 

Our book club met on January 30, 2023, to discuss How Charts Lie: Getting Smarter about Visual Information by Alberto Cairo. We had a good turnout (6, including a new AMWA member, Arrianna Carey). Cairo is the Knight Chair in Visual Journalism in the School of Communication at the University of Miami, and his book presents critical analysis about charts that also includes useful tips about interpretation, construction, and presentation. 

The Book 

How Charts Lie is geared toward a general audience but includes enough to interest science readers. The book is only 234 pages long, with the text spanning 202 pages divided among 6 chapters, conclusion, and an afterword. It is a fast read; I finished it in a single sitting. A short acknowledgements section, notes, bibliography, further readings, and index complete the book The book was published in in hardcover in 2019 and paperback in 2020. 

Cairo presents principles in a step-by-step manner, dissecting multiple examples to explain how to become a better chart reader, analyze deficiencies, and create more effective illustrations. Although the author refers to charts, he uses the term for multiple forms of visual display of data—figures, graphs, scatter charts, and others. The overarching messages are that charts only present data and that one should be careful not overinterpret them. He includes a helpful list of “rules of thumb” for analyzing charts (pp 103-105) that could serve as a precis. Cairo employs multiple examples mostly from news stories, but he also dissects more sophisticated figures from meteorology, climate science, and health statistics. The paperback edition has an added afterword that analyzes early figures of COVID-19 statistics. The text contains a few footnotes without being distracting. His references include other texts for those seeking more detailed explanations. 

Something for Everyone 

This book offers many useful tips. One relevant warning concerns using figures, eg, using circles to illustrate numerical comparisons. Although the symbols are meant to reflect actual values, the diameters can make the differences appear larger than they are (p.33-35). Cairo also cautions against overinterpreting associations. He repeats the statistical mantra, “Correlation is not causation.” Some examples illustrate this point. One spurious correlation suggests (erroneously) that smoking more cigarettes leads to longer life (pp 153-158). He presents other such examples throughout. 

Cairo warns about figures derived from biased data. Mary Knatterud said, “I especially appreciated Cairo’s overarching warning about any chart whose ‘source employs ideologically loaded, bombastic, or aggressive language. If it does, stop paying attention to it, even if it’s just for entertainment.’ “(p 106) His analyses of temperatures, global warming (pp 137-140), and demographic data (p 121-133) serve as good explanations of the effects of truncating or compressing figure axes and combining projections into a single figure. 

The book includes a section of other useful texts in Further Reading. I was surprised to see him mention the work Edwin Tufte,1 who is an expert and conducts seminars on effective data presentation. A few years ago, our then-president, Michael Franklin, gave a chapter presentation about Tufte’s work attending a Tufte workshop. Those who are interested can seek out those books. 

Mary Knatterud pointed out his relevant comments about social media and sharing data at its unvetted, subjective worst. Cairo says: 

“The world will be a much better place if we all begin curbing our sharing impulses a bit more often. In the past, only professionals with access to publishing platforms—journalists and the owners of newspapers, magazines, or TV stations—controlled the information that the public received. Today, every single one of us is a curator of information, a role that implies certain responsibilities. One of them is to make sure, whenever we can, that whatever content we read and help spread looks legitimate, particularly if that content seems to confirm our most strongly rooted ideological beliefs and prejudices.” (p 87) 

I liked Cairo’s inclusion of historical examples. He traces the origins of graphic displays of data to Florence Nightingale’s analysis of mortality data from the Crimean War (p. 175-180).2,3 That figure is akin to one reproduced in Tufte’s work that includes multiple statistics about the retreat of Napoleon’s army from Russia in 1812.4 Both figures pack considerable data in single figures that resemble art rather than displays of data. 

Complaints 

Some of the graphics suffer in the paperback edition. That edition employed orange and grey, rather than the red and black colors used in the hardcover edition. The discrepancy was not corrected in paperback text that refers to “red” or “black” rather than the actual orange and grey. Additionally, the color contrast was poor and made some figures difficult to make out, particularly in charts that employed maps. Importantly, the color combination was hard on the eyes and difficult for readers who are color-blind, as one of our new members, Arrianna Carey, pointed out. 

Several of us noticed that one of the charts was mislabeled, perhaps by an editor (p 24). Cairo displayed two sets of charts– one corrected, one not–and depending on which edition one read, the figures either showed the contrast correctly or showed the same figure twice. The error was glaring. 

Some figure reproductions were disappointing, particularly Florence Nightingale’s seminal diagram.2,3 Although Cairo’s step-by-step dissection of the figure in the text partly mitigates the defect, having a good reproduction would have been welcome. We have noticed poorly reproduced figures in other book club selections, but in this case, poor reproduction and blurry images detract from the book. (For those interested Nightingale’s figure is available for use via Wikipedia Commons.2) 

Many of us would have liked fewer political examples, although we agreed that they were useful for illustrating the principles discussed. Despite being repetitive, the charts used were informative and entertaining. 

One final quibble was that some book titles mentioned in the text do not appear in the bibliography. For example, although Cairo mentions Edwin Tufte, none of Tufte’s works appear in the bibliography. The footnotes contain many citations, so some omissions are not critical. 

Parting Comments and Suggested Readings 

We would recommend this book. In addition to books previously noted, other texts are worthwhile. For a more scholarly treatment of graphs, consider a text by Edwin Tufte,1 an expert on data presentation. For a lighter work about simple statistics, consider How to Lie with Statistics by Darrell Huff (illustrated by Irving Geis).5 The cartoons are witty. Given how old the book is (originally published in 1954), I was pleasantly surprised to see it mentioned (One of my graduate school professors suggested it, long ago). 

What’s Next 

Our next book club meeting will be on April 24, 2023. We will discuss The Illusion of Evidence-Based Medicine: Exposing the Crisis of Credibility in Clinical Research by Jon Jureidini and Leemon B McHenry. Please join us, even if you haven’t read the book. 

References and Additional Reading 

1. Tufte E. The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. Cheshire, CT: Graphics Press, 2001.

2. File: Nightingale-mortality.jpg – Wikimedia Commons [Accessed January 25, 2023]

3. Florence Nightingale’s statistical diagrams [Accessed January 25, 2023]

4. Edward Tufte: Posters and Graph Paper [Accessed January 25, 2023]

5. Huff D, Geis I. How to Lie With Statistics. New York: W.W. Norton, 1993 (Originally published in 1954)