Welcome!

Welcome to the resources for the Communicating and visualising future uncertainty session at The Art and Science of Uncertainty and the Future Interdisciplinary Summer School!

Abstract

This interactive workshop will focus on best practices for communicating uncertainty through language and visual storytelling. The workshop brings together principles from data journalism, data visualisation, and content design to explore how uncertainty can be represented in ways that are both accurate and engaging.

By the end of the session, participants will understand why it’s important to be upfront about uncertainty and be aware of best practice principles they can use to know when and how to discuss uncertainty from different sources. Participants will learn about approaches to communicating uncertainty without overwhelming or misleading audiences. They will also develop techniques for visualising uncertainty, using a variety of different chart types.

Through practical exercises, real‑world examples, and group discussion, the session will provide a toolkit for communicating complex data in a way that allows better evidence-based decision making.

By the end of this session, participants will:

• Understand how communicating uncertainty can increase trustworthiness and know when it is important and appropriate to talk about uncertainty
• Have an understanding of the language used to describe and communicate uncertainty, especially for non-technical audiences
• Know when it is and isn’t appropriate to show uncertainty in visualisations
• Be able to create a range of chart types for showing uncertainty and follow best practices when doing so

Slides will be shared with participants. The discussions relating to data visualisation will be tool agnostic, but the R code use to create any examples will be made available after the session. There are no prerequisites for this workshop.

Session information

• 09:15 - 10:30: How and when to write about uncertainty (Patrick Scott)

  • When to discuss uncertainty
  • Principles of discussing and writing about uncertainty
  • Language of uncertainty and structuring content

• 10:30 - 11:00: Break

• 11:00 - 12:15: How and when to visualise uncertainty (Nicola Rennie)

  • When to visualise uncertainty
  • Principles of visualising uncertainty
  • Chart types for visualising uncertainty
  • Practical examples with R code
  • Exercise 1: create a chart using R
  • Exercise 2: discussion