In “How Deceptive are Deceptive Visualizations?”, the researchers first define the concept of deceptive visualization as “a graphical depiction of information, designed with or without an intent to deceive, that may create a belief about the message and/or its components, which varies from the actual message”. After that the paper focuses on two types of message-level deception: “Message Exaggeration / understatement”, and “Message Reversal”, and four techniques associated with them: truncated axis, area as quantity, aspect ratio, inverted axis. Later, the researchers conducted a case study, whose results confirmed that the four techniques mentioned before do lead to major misinterpretation.

By looking at the examples of deceptive graphics giving by the paper, I think it is a bit difficult to read the graphics without any context, and judge whether they are deceptive. For instance, I can see the bar graphic of “Access to Safe Drinking Water in Willowtown and Silvatown, as of 2010” to be a good graphic if it is placed in an article where the writer firstly presents the graphic of access to safe drinking water of all the towns with y-axis ranging from 0 to 100%, and then zoom in to the “Truncated Axis” graphic from the paper, to talk about a detailed comparison between Willowtown and Silvatown. In some way, the “Truncated Axis” method functions similar to a log-scale graph, which could be useful in many circumstances, but would also cause misunderstanding if people are lacking background information, or not looking at the graphic carefully.