On-Demand Learning Lab: Truthful and Useful - Presenting Data for Change in the Age of Fake News-Handout Truthful & Useful

Handout Truthful & Useful

Pdf Summary

Stephen Durkota’s presentation, “Truthful and Useful—Presenting Data for Change in the Age of Fake News,” argues that in a period of declining public trust (“information bankruptcy,” referenced via Edelman’s 2021 Trust Barometer), healthcare quality professionals have an ethical duty to become both highly data literate and highly effective communicators who can drive change.<br /><br />The session’s learning objectives are to: (1) critique data visualizations, (2) make presentations more truthful by avoiding dishonest design, and (3) make presentations more useful by understanding the audience and using storytelling to prompt action.<br /><br />A key framework is visual rhetoric and the communication process (encoding/decoding between sender and receiver). Drawing on Manning & Amare, the talk describes three goals of rhetoric—evoke emotion, promote understanding, and provoke action—and links them to three visual strategies: “decoratives” (help audiences feel without distracting), “indicatives” (guide what audiences should see by filtering the irrelevant), and “informatives” (clarify meaning without overwhelming).<br /><br />To stay truthful, the presentation warns against “mindbugs” (Alberto Cairo): patternicity (seeing patterns that aren’t there), storytelling (inventing explanations), and confirmation bias (reinforcing the invented story). Practical design cautions include ensuring visual proportions accurately reflect data proportions, avoiding misleading dual axes (with rare exception), and avoiding ecological fallacies—drawing conclusions about individuals based on group-level data (illustrated with election-map examples).<br /><br />To be useful, presenters must know their audience and close the gap between the presenter’s understanding and the customer’s understanding. The talk emphasizes storytelling to create “resonance” (Duarte): structuring communication as setup, problem, and resolution/call to action, framing the audience as the heroes, leading with intrigue to avoid “data muck,” and ending with clear consequences and opportunities. Practical tips include remembering “you are the presentation,” using slide titles to advance the narrative, and leveraging white space for emphasis.

Keywords

data visualization ethics

healthcare quality improvement

fake news and public trust

Edelman Trust Barometer 2021

visual rhetoric

communication encoding decoding

truthful presentation design

misleading dual axes

ecological fallacy

data storytelling for change