I could have split the import price into "crude" and "premium", but the documents print cost and freight as one line. Any split would have been my estimate presented as fact, so it stays one line. A row the document doesn't carry shows as empty, not 0.00, because a zero tells the reader something the source never said. I also renamed a bucket from "The state" to "Government". The figures didn't change, but people read "the state" as something abstract and "government" as someone who takes a cut.
Same data and same sources, but each of those calls changes what a reader walks away believing.
It's very possible GP used AI to translate to English. In my experience llms love to change sentences to match their own preferred ways of speaking when translating.
One example would be sufficient to establish that it is "not always neutral", but I think no example can establish that data visualisation is never neutral.
As far as neutrality is concerned, I'd like to see someone argue that a graph of sin(x) with x between 0 and 2pi and y between say -1.5 and +1.5 is not neutral, provided it is presented as a graphical approximation of the function and domain.
For other numerical graphs, such as stock prices, or population development, there's always the possibility that it isn't represented in sufficient detail, but that would depend on the user's knowledge and expectation, I think. How to lie with statistics is a good starting point for that. The article suggests the same idea, but makes it a social issue.
Assigning neutrality or bias without viewer of interaction is a category error. It is not an intrinsic property of the graph despite our wanting to simplify the world this way. It's like saying chocolate is intrinsically the best candy when what's being said is 'my relationship to chocolate is that it's my favorite.'
> you've obscured the fact that the function is periodic
No. Periodicity is not a property in a graph. The graph still shows the function in that domain neutrally, as far as I can tell. Neutral meaning: impartial, without strongly marked characteristics.
If you insist on periodicity: there's an infinite (uncountable) number of properties not shown. If that violates neutrality, every statement is biased, which makes the article's statement rather trivial.
If you have to specify everything in text and you don't intend to actually communicate anything through graphics and if you only focus on pure, sterile mathematical functions which don't have an ideological component that could be biased to begin with... then surely you can see that your statement is the trivial one.
> The graph still shows the function in that domain neutrally
The key word being "in that domain". You can use the same excuse every time you mislead people with statistics. The fact that your choices can mislead people proves that they're not neutral.
This idea seems inconsistent with the idea that no map can be objective. The examples given have to do with an unfamiliar audience (the Spanish) misinterpreting the map. There is an explicit acknowledgement that a correct interpretation does exist! There is objective info in there if you know how to read it.
I think there is a hidden assumption that objective means "every single person who sees this will understand it." This is of course impossible but it's important to emphasize that the majority of people, in almost all cases, will mess something up. So I dislike the framing of data visualization is not neutral, the analyst is imposing their view on the world and exercising lots of power, etc and prefer "it's just stupidly hard and you gotta pick a few people you are actually talking too."
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