Alberto Cairo (born 1974 in

A Coruña A Coruña (; ; also informally called just Coruña; historical English: Corunna or The Groyne) is a city and municipality in Galicia, Spain. It is Galicia's second largest city, behind Vigo. The city is the provincial capital of the province ...

) is a Spanish information designer and professor. Cairo is the Knight Chair in Visual Journalism at the School of Communication of the

University of Miami The University of Miami (UM, UMiami, Miami, U of M, and The U) is a private university, private research university in Coral Gables, Florida, United States. , the university enrolled 19,852 students in two colleges and ten schools across over ...

Education

Cairo holds a BA in

Journalism Journalism is the production and distribution of reports on the interaction of events, facts, ideas, and people that are the "news of the day" and that informs society to at least some degree of accuracy. The word, a noun, applies to the journ ...

from the

University of Santiago de Compostela The University of Santiago de Compostela - USC (, ) is a public university located in the city of Santiago de Compostela, Galicia, Spain. A second campus is located in Lugo, Galicia. It is one of the world's oldest universities in continuous o ...

, and MA and PhD from the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (in

Barcelona Barcelona ( ; ; ) is a city on the northeastern coast of Spain. It is the capital and largest city of the autonomous community of Catalonia, as well as the second-most populous municipality of Spain. With a population of 1.6 million within c ...

Career

Cairo began working as a journalist in the late 1990s, at ''La Voz de Galicia'' (The Voice of Galicia), and then at ''Diario 16'' (Diary 16) where he worked on print graphics. He then worked as a data-journalist and information designer at El Mundo, Spain's second largest printed daily newspaper, where he experimented with emerging tools like Macromedia Flash to make multimedia infographics. He became the director of the paper's online component, supervising five people, at a time when very few global newspapers were doing similar graphical work. Notable multimedia articles included the paper's coverage of the

September 11 attacks The September 11 attacks, also known as 9/11, were four coordinated Islamist terrorist suicide attacks by al-Qaeda against the United States in 2001. Nineteen terrorists hijacked four commercial airliners, crashing the first two into ...

in the US in 2001, and the

2004 Madrid train bombings The 2004 Madrid train bombings (also known in Spain as 11M) were a series of coordinated, nearly simultaneous bombings against the Cercanías commuter train system of Madrid, Spain, on the morning of 11 March 2004—three days before Spain's ...

. In 2005, Cairo was hired by the

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC, UNC–Chapel Hill, or simply Carolina) is a public university, public research university in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, United States. Chartered in 1789, the university first began enrolli ...

to teach Flash, 3D animation, and interactive graphics. He returned to the publishing world in 2007, now based in

São Paulo São Paulo (; ; Portuguese for 'Paul the Apostle, Saint Paul') is the capital of the São Paulo (state), state of São Paulo, as well as the List of cities in Brazil by population, most populous city in Brazil, the List of largest cities in the ...

, Brazil, where he worked on graphics for the magazine '' Época''. He was the director for Infographics and Multimedia at

Editora Globo Editora Globo S.A. is a Brazilian publishing house, property of :pt:Fundação Roberto Marinho, Fundação Roberto Marinho. It began as a bookstore called Livraria do Globo, created in Porto Alegre, in December 1883, by Laudelino Pinheiro de Barc ...

in Brazil. Cairo returned to the world of education in 2012 at the University of Miami. That year, he created the first

Massive Open Online Course A massive open online course (MOOC ) or an open online course is an online course aimed at unlimited participation and open access via the World Wide Web, Web. In addition to traditional course materials, such as filmed lectures, readings, and p ...

in journalism, "Introduction to Infographics and Data Visualization," with the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas. Cairo teaches for the journalism department and the Master of Fine Arts in Interactive Media program, and is the director of the visualization program at the Frost Institute for Data Science and Computing. In 2016, Cairo designed a dataset that would appear as a dinosaur when visualized, emphasizing to, "Never trust summary statistics alone; always visualize your data". It would end up inspiring the creation of the Datasaurus dozen.

Books

* ''The Functional Art: an Introduction to Information Graphics and Visualization'' (2012) * ''The Truthful Art: Data, Charts, and Maps for Communication'' (2016) * '' How Charts Lie'' (2019)

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Cairo, Alberto Living people American digital artists Spanish digital artists University of Miami faculty University of Santiago de Compostela alumni American male journalists Spanish male journalists American people of Spanish descent 1974 births