Great Data Stories for Your Inspiration
Lesson 30 from: Data Storytelling: Deliver Insights via Compelling StoriesBill Shander
Great Data Stories for Your Inspiration
Lesson 30 from: Data Storytelling: Deliver Insights via Compelling StoriesBill Shander
Lessons
Introduction
1Class Introduction
03:29 2Do The Exercises
00:37 3Communication Challenges and Solutions
05:20 4Exercise: 4X4 Model
04:31 5Exercise Solution: 4X4 Model
03:25 6Introduction - Quiz
Thinking Like a Communicator
The Power of Story
06:48 8Six Ways to Tap Into Your Inner Storyteller
12:32 9The Importance of Understanding Your Audience
03:42 10How to Understand Your Audience
04:35 11How to Embrace Emotion (to review)
04:38 12How to Tap Into Your Inherent Creativity
05:55 13Exercise: An Emotional Story
01:29 14Exercise Solution: An Emotional Story
01:12 15Thinking Like a Communicator - Quiz
Telling Data Stories
16Basic Data Analytics Tactics
08:54 17Basic Journalism Tactics
04:56 18Defining Your Story
05:37 19Sketching and Storyboarding
07:05 20Use Your Words
04:20 21Telling Data Stories - Quiz
Essential Design Principles
22The Power of Visuals
07:44 23How to Pick the Right Chart for Your Data
05:19 24Exercise: Chart Selection
06:27 25Exercise: Visualization
02:59 26Basic Chart Designs Principles
08:21 27Research Driven Design Principles
06:27 28Exercise: A Data Story
03:50 29Essential Design Principles - Quiz
And Now What?
30Great Data Stories for Your Inspiration
05:53 31Tips and Tricks
03:53 32How to Sell Data Storytelling Services
03:56 33A Conversation Guide for Talking to Prospects About Data Storytelling Projects
05:30 34Course Summary
02:48Final Quiz
35Final Quiz
Lesson Info
Great Data Stories for Your Inspiration
there are many great examples of data storytelling out in the wild these days, but the best are coming mostly from journalism. Not surprisingly, I wanted to share a few more that I really like for different reasons. One of my favorite data stories that I've seen recently is the Fallen of World War Two. It's a video. So I'm going to click into it and just sort of talk as it starts to play here and maybe skip around a little bit. This is something that I really recommend you take a look at. It's an excellent example of that purely author driven storytelling experience and it's looking as the title would imply at everyone who died in World War Two. You know, it's a bit of a dark subject matter, but it's also very simple data, right? How many people died when from where? And as you can see as it's starting to tell the story, it's based on a timeline overall. And you know, here we're starting out looking at the leaders, the people who were involved at the highest echelon. But I'm just gonna...
jump around a little bit and skip ahead The main point here. And we're not going to watch the whole thing is that it very elegantly and very simply tells the story in so many different ways of, as I said, who these people were, who died, where they came from, where they perished etcetera. And it tells it in so many different ways visually using those bar charts using timelines etcetera. I highly recommend you take a look, it's really, really well done and as I said, it's like one of my favorites, another example and this is sort of in a different category. Fivethirtyeight does some amazing work of course doing data storytelling generally and some of their data stories have a lot of visuals and interactives and things going on. This is just one of hundreds of examples from them. It's just a simple text based data story with a couple of charts, But it's such a nerdy, data driven subject that it really does a good job of explaining something that's really hard for people to understand. So we're looking at what are the odds that the powerball could give America its first billion dollar jackpots. This is from, you know, back in July of 2015. Um but it really breaks down probability and odds and lottery and it's sort of looking at how many, what are the odds that one winner or four winners etcetera might win the lottery, just text and charts. But it does a really good job of breaking it down in a way that even somewhat mathematically disinclined people could understand. So not the most crazy engaging visual interactive data storytelling in the world, but really effective storytelling. If I focus on that end of the spectrum here, One of my other favorites, as I mentioned earlier in the course, People have a really hard time understanding large numbers and especially understanding certain kinds of data. So this one came out in May of after there was a huge amount of flooding in Texas and during the storytelling, during that entire sort of news experience. The story came out that all told as it says right here, eight million acre feet of water flowed into the state's reservoirs during all that flooding. What does that mean? And so this article, the only point of it, the Corvettes here is to try to explain what eight million acre feet of water looks like. So this is one acre foot of water, this cube and here we have a human. So physically I get a sense of the size of this. If I keep scrolling down, here's what 1000 acre feet are compared to the statue of Liberty. Again compared to this little speck which is one human and this just goes on and on down the page using very simple visual forms to try to get to the idea of what eight million acre feet of water really is so I can wrap my head around it and as I keep going and scrolling down the page, the first long chunk of this article is really devoted to this physical size of eight million acre feet of water, comparing it to large buildings, comparing it to buildings that are closer to home, comparing it to the human size scale earlier. But really it's not until I get to the end, I think that this article really brings it home because while a giant cube of this size tells me something that's a whole bunch of water I get it. I don't really know what it means yet until I get to here where it says it's enough water to put the entire state of Rhode island under 10 ft of water. I live near Rhode island. I know what that means. I can really get a sense of it here. Very focused data storytelling, very focused article, great core wits and it does a fantastic job both visually and in text explaining the idea. And then my final example New York Times does probably the best certainly one of the top three uh best jobs of doing data storytelling these days. This is one of many, many, many examples of theirs. I could have pointed to 10 others at least 40 others. So this is about how the U. S. And opec drive oil prices starts with a little bit of text not a ton. And this is a typical what they call scroll telling experience. Whereas I scroll things change on the page and once I get to a certain point um the chart actually remains the focal point and now the text is what moves and as I scroll you can see the chart is changing once again as in some other things I've shown before the linear experience is complete. I could literally read this copy one bit by bit and get a very complete data story. And the charts. The visualizations really help bring it home and the interactivity and the animation really sort of reinforces what the text is saying. Just another great, simple linear, author driven, yet also reader driven experience that is among the best of its kind. As I said, these are just a few of so many great examples of data storytelling. Throughout this course, I've shared some of my favorite data stories from publications producing much of the best work of this kind, like The New york Times, Bloomberg Washington Post and Fivethirtyeight. I recommend you look at their work continually for inspiration.
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