How Data Narratives Go Wrong: A Taxonomy of Issues Across the Data Communication Process
2026-07-12 • Human-Computer Interaction
Human-Computer InteractionComputers and Society
AI summaryⓘ
The authors studied why data stories often fail to communicate correctly, finding that problems go beyond simple mistakes or misleading visuals. They created TIC, a system that groups common issues into six areas like data quality, analysis, and how the story is told and understood. They also made a collection of 700 real examples to explain these problems and built a tool for exploring them. This work helps people better understand where data communication breaks down and how to improve trust in data stories.
data narrativesdata communicationtaxonomyvisual encodingfact-checkinginterpretationqualitative annotationanalysisnarrative constructionaudience reception
Authors
Yu Fu, Jiawei Zhou, Sichen Jin, Munmun De Choudhury, Cindy Xiong Bearfield, John Stasko
Abstract
Data narratives increasingly shape public understanding, but their failures are rarely just isolated factual errors or deceptive charts. Instead, they emerge through a broader meaning-making process in which quantitative evidence is transformed into claims, representations, and arguments. While prior work has examined these failures across disparate fields (e.g., statistics, visualization, and fact-checking), the community lacks a holistic lens to explain how these issues arise, propagate, and compound. To address this gap, we introduce TIC, a Taxonomy of Issues in Data Communication, synthesized from prior literature and refined through the qualitative annotation of 700 real-world data narratives from fact-checking sites, research datasets, and controversial media. TIC organizes recurring breakdowns across six dimensions-data, analysis, visual encoding, text, reasoning, and interpretation-and situates them within a framework spanning analysis, narrative construction, and audience reception. Alongside the taxonomy and process framework, we contribute a qualitatively annotated case corpus with coding justifications and an interactive browsing interface. Collectively, these contributions provide a structured lens for diagnosing problematic data narratives and informing future sociotechnical support for trustworthy data communication.