Crafting Visual Stories with Data

Stories have been recognised for their power of persuasion for centuries. There is a well established and articulated architecture of storytelling across different mediums – oral storytelling, journalistic written stories, graphic comics and even movies. Similarly, data visualisations have enabled us to now compress data and encode them in ways to aid perceptual, cognitive and emotional capacity required to comprehend, retain and make decisions using this data. Persuasive communication in business requires us to work at this intersection of data, visuals and stories. We are all talking about telling stories with data but the exact architecture within this domain is still left implicit. There has been some research on narrative visualisations but nothing that deeply explores the idea of rich storytelling with data.

This slidedeck aims to help you learn the art and science of crafting visual stories with data. It is a cross disciplinary activity that requires us to operate at the intersection of a visual designer, coder, statistician, and storyteller. The focus is on on sharing ‘why’ stories work and aim to unpack the many dimensions of crafting a data-visual-story. These dimensions are Abstraction (data patterns), Representation (visual encoding), Framing & Transition (perspective, focus), Messaging (verbal, annotation), Flow (arrangement) and Interactivity. It uses  exemplars from real-world data-stories to explore this topic.