Communicating and Visualising Future Uncertainty

Workshop

Communicating and Visualising Future Uncertainty

Instructor: Dr Nicola Rennie, Data Visualisation Specialist, Office for National Statistics

Summary

This interactive workshop focuses on best practices for communicating uncertainty through language and visual storytelling. It 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.

Participants will learn when and how to discuss uncertainty from different sources, how to avoid overwhelming or misleading audiences, and how to use different chart types to visualise uncertainty effectively.

Instructor Bio

Nicola Rennie is a data visualisation specialist with a background in statistics and operational research. She is interested in communicating complex quantitative ideas in accessible ways and advocates for open-source tools. Her experience includes D3, Svelte, R, and Python.

She co-authored the Royal Statistical Society’s best-practice guidance on data visualisation and serves on the editorial board of Significance magazine with a particular focus on visual communication.

Learning Outcomes

  • Understand how communicating uncertainty can increase trustworthiness.

  • Use language that explains uncertainty clearly, especially for non-technical audiences.

  • Know when it is and is not appropriate to show uncertainty in visualisations.

  • Create a range of chart types for showing uncertainty and apply best practices.

Session Structure

  • 15 mins: Introduction to communicating uncertainty.

  • 60 mins: Principles of communicating uncertainty and the language of uncertainty.

  • 30 mins: Break.

  • 60 mins: Visualising uncertainty in data communication.

  • 15 mins: Closing thoughts, further resources, and questions.

Pre-Reading

Materials

  • Slides