Latest Chartjunk Stories

Those oft-maligned, and highly embellished, graphs and charts in USA Today and other media outlets may actually help people understand data more effectively than traditional graphs, according to new research from North Carolina State University.Newspapers and magazines often embellish charts or graphs to draw attention to them or to highlight information. Some experts describe these graphic embellishments as "chart junk," which they argue detracts from a graph or chart's...