MICA presents Alberto Cairo, author of The Functional Art and The Truthful Art, and his Visual Trumpery Tour.

Alberto Cairo’s Visual Trumpery Tour could not come at a more relevant time where “fake news”, lies, and videotape are opening the cracks of our nation wide open, exposing the underbelly of our media, politics, corporations, and legal system. The English word “trumpery” means worthless nonsense, something that is showy and deceitful at the same time. Trumpery can occur in text, verbally, or visually. Cairo’s non-partisan talk focuses on the visual, examining misleading charts, graphs, and data maps designed by individuals and organizations from across the political spectrum.

Alberto Cairo is the Knight Chair in Visual Journalism at the University of Miami. He teaches data visualization and infographics in the Journalism and Interactive Media Masters programs. He is also the director of the Visualization Program at UM’s Center for Computational Science.

Alberto has been in journalism for twenty years, as a director of infographics and multimedia at news publications in Spain —his country of origin— and Brazil. He has also been a professor at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.

Besides teaching at UM, Alberto works as a freelancer and consultant for institutions and companies including Google, Microsoft, the European Union, and many others.

Alberto has written two books about visualization, The Functional Art: An Introduction to Information Graphics and Visualization (2012) and The Truthful Art: Data, Charts, and Maps for Communication (2016). He is currently working on a third one, related to this talk.

Presented by MICA Open Studies and the master’s program in Information Visualization.