Storytelling with Data: Introduction
This is a slightly modified version of a talk I gave at the 2017 Symposium by the Sea in Florence, Oregon.
I’ve seen us challenged as a community by communicating clearly. The things we create sometimes get in the way of easy understanding. We get caught up in the details, and our audience gets lost along the way.
I’ve seen us struggling to identify our audience. If we don’t understand their needs, then how can we hope they will use what we build?
I’ve seen us failing to to understand the problem completely before launching into a solution. We like solving problems! But in the euphoria of creating the perfect solution, we fail to notice that we solved the wrong problem.
I’ve seen us challenged to identify the outcome, and when we don’t, we miss the opportunity to have a larger impact.
I hope that by understanding our audience, their challenges, and the outcome we hope to achieve, that we will be able to use narratives with data to more effectively communicate, and bring about change in the world.
What is a story?
In essence, a story is about a challenge that is overcome to achieve a more positive outcome. When it comes to storytelling with data, it is not the data that overcome the challenges. It is people, empowered by those data, that overcome the challenges.
Think of these people as the heroes of the story.
We may not normally think of our audience that way, but these are the people we are rooting for. When you are building something to capture or communicate information, who are your heroes?
Our heroes are the people that are going to act on that information.
Our heroes are our audience.
Part of what makes heroes in stories interesting is how they overcome challenges. If they do not encounter any — be they super-villains, personal strife, or flying spaghetti monsters — we would be bored and the story would not teach us anything.
In the next two stories, my heroes are working incredibly hard to overcome major social, political, and biological barriers. We are using data within a narrative to empower our heroes to overcome their challenges.
Why do we tell stories?
Stories help us reason about something we don’t understand. We’ve been doing this for countless generations. Through increasingly sophisticated technology, we are able to capture more information than ever before. But do we understand it?
Even in the so-called information age, we need to use storytelling to impart understanding about increasingly complex concepts. We cannot simply transfer around bits and bytes, and expect them to make sense.
Our brains aren’t wired that way.
Instead, we need to craft the narrative around those data to act as the interface between the raw data and our brain cells.
How are stories effective?
Stories change our perspective
A story gives us a chance to see things from a different point of view. They give us a rare opportunity to step outside ourselves.
The greatest value of a picture is when it forces us to notice what we never expected to see. — John Tukey
A story, told with data, may surprise and delight us. Or shock us into action.
Stories use repetition
The deeper we get into a story, the more we become comfortable with a storyteller’s approach. Their descriptive style starts painting a picture in our minds. Their words — even if initially unfamiliar to us — become part of our vocabulary.
The same is true within storytelling around data. We need to look for the patterns, and build a natural rhythm around them. Some of the most effective tricks for learning something new directly hijack our brains in this way: through carefully spaced repetitions over time, a new concept or word becomes familiar.
But repetition doesn’t mean repeating yourself. Look for ways to embed echoes, so that bringing the concept up again in new ways can help your audience gain familiarity over time.
So how do we become storytellers with data?
Understand the problem
Before we can craft an effective narrative to overcome challenges in the world, we need to understand the problem.
It’s better to solve the right problem approximately than to solve the wrong problem exactly. — John Tukey
Time spent understanding the problem is time well spent.
If the problem is that the manner in which we are presenting information to our audience is too complex to easily impart understanding, then why should we fool ourselves into thinking that adding more details will help make it more clear?
Understand the desired outcome
It’s not about what is, it’s about what it can become.
Before we create a map, data visualization, or data collection app, we need to understand what is going to be different in the world after our audience engages with it.
Understand the audience
In order to achieve that outcome, we have to understand our audience.
How familiar is the audience with the concepts we are communicating? What things are going to prevent them from understanding our narrative? What can we do to overcome those issues?
Simplify
One of the most powerful things we can do as storytellers is simplify the story.
If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough. — Albert Einstein
Simplicity is deceptively hard. But in the end, it is worth the effort.
When we create something, such as a map, a geodatabase schema, the most awesome data visualization dashboard ever , we need to take a good, close look at it.
Can it be simplified? We need to be brave and go ahead and do it.
Sometimes that means that we have to unlearn things we’ve been taught.
Some of us were taught that our maps weren’t done unless they had a legend, north arrow, and scalebar. We need to question whether or not those things are essential: must our users measure distances on the map in order to understand it? If not, that scalebar needs to go.
While I was preparing this talk, I had an important realization.
Data don’t tell stories.
People do.
There is no narrative in the data, waiting to be uncovered. We cannot fool ourselves into thinking that if we just put the data out there, they will speak for themselves. There is only the narrative that we weave with the data, to communicate from one person to another.
