Annotating Line Charts for Addressing Deception

Abstract

Deceptive visualizations are visualizations that, whether intentionally or not, lead the reader to an understanding of the data which varies from the actual data. Examples of deceptive visualizations can be found in every digital platform, and, despite their widespread use in the wild, there have been limited efforts to alert laypersons to common deceptive visualization practices. In this paper, we present a tool for annotating line charts in the wild that reads line chart images and outputs text and visual annotations to assess the line charts for distortions and help guide the reader towards an honest understanding of the chart data. We demonstrate the usefulness of our tool through a series of case studies on real-world charts. Finally, we perform a crowdsourced experiment to evaluate the ability of the proposed tool to educate readers about potentially deceptive visualization practices.