Effective Design and Ethical Data Visualization: What is "Good" Data Presentation and Why Does it Matter?

What is “good” information presentation and why does it matter? This lecture presents data visualization as a fundamentally humanistic act that demands critical literacy, interpretive judgment, and ethical awareness. Foregrounding humanistic reasoning, the talk explores core principles governing clear and responsible graphical representations across digital and analog media and examines how choices of chart type, scale, visual hierarchy, color schemes, and framing influence legibility and interpretation. Grounded in practical design frameworks and ethical considerations, the presentation offers actionable guidance for creating visualizations that clarify without oversimplifying, communicate without distorting, and explicitly acknowledge their interpretive choices.

This presentation is part of the Digital Humanities After Hours lecture series, hosted by the Centre for Digital Humanities and Arts (DARIAH-IS/CDHA, https://www.mshl.is) in Autumn 2025.

Learning Outcomes

After studying the resource, learners should be able to:

• differentiate between the different major branches of visualization and graph types and evaluate their appropriate use cases in humanistic research;
• apply core visual design and perceptual principles to present complex qualitative and quantitative data clearly and accurately;
• critique deceptive or flawed visualizations by identifying manipulative visual rhetoric;
• evaluate the ethical responsibilities of data presentation in the digital humanities.