Data Driven Storytelling

Nathan Gasser Rock River Star ngasser@rockriverstar.com

Drupaldelphia 2014

What is Data Visualization?

• The visual representation of data

• "information that has been abstracted in some form"

Data Driven Storytelling

• Using data to tell a story

• Why?

– People are visual

– Humans are wired for storytelling

• There are 5 important things to consider

5 Things to Consider

1. Your data

2. Your data

3. Your data

4. Your data

5. Your data

5 Things to Consider

1. Your story

2. Your story

3. Your story

4. Your story

5. Your story

5 Things to Consider

1. Your story

2. Your data

3. Your audience

4. Your skillz

5. Your stage

1. Your Story

• What is your story?

– People don’t care about your numbers, they care about what

your numbers represent

• Is it a simple story? A complex story?

• Are there different interpretations?

– Do you want people to explore and come to their own

conclusions?

– Do you have one message you want them to take away?

Storytelling According To Tolstoy

“All great literature is one of two

stories; a man goes on a journey, or a

stranger comes to town”

Storytelling according to Pixar

Google “Pixar’s rules of storytelling.” There are 22 of them.

#4, aka the Story Spine (Kenn Adams)

Once upon a time there was ______. Every day, _________.

One day, _________. Because of that, ___________. Because of

that___________. Until finally, _____________.

Elements of a good story

• Setting

– Where are we, and why are we here?

• Character

– Protagonists & Antagonists

– Conflict & Potential

• Plot

– Backstory, Action, Resolution

• Detail

– Detail, not digression

Exercises

• Identify the elements in your favorite story

• Identify the elements in an effective campaign

– advertising, awareness, fundraising, advocacy

– tv, print, online

• Identify the elements in your story

2. Your Data

• What do you have?

• What can you get?

• How is it stored?

• Does it need to be processed?

• How often does it need to be updated?

• Do you want to/need to share your data?

3. Your Audience

• What's their familiarity with your subject matter?

• What's their expectation of the effort involved to

understand your story?

• What's the context in which they're interacting with your

story?

• Can you equip your audience to retell your story to

others?

– Is it your story, or theirs?

4. Your Skillz

• APIs, NoSQL, JSON, SVG, FLOT, oh my...

• Right Brain vs. Left Brain

• What can you realistically pull off?

• Are you doing this yourself or can you call for backup?

5. Your Stage

• Online

– Your website

– Social Media

– Embedding your data on other websites

– Mobile

• Print

– Are you printing, or are your readers?

• Can you increase your impact by using multiple channels?

TYPES OF VISUALIZATIONS

I heard you liked examples

A few types of visualizations

Charts http://viz.healthmetricsandevaluation.org/gbd-compare/

Maps http://pooreconomics.com/data/country/home

Infographic http://visual.ly/heartbleed-checklist

Interactive http://foods.bridgingthegapresearch.org

Immersive Presentation http://rwjf.org/maketobaccohistory?cid=xtw_pubhealth

TOOLS

How do I get me some of that?

Data Processing

• Anything but Drupal

bash ftw

$ cat page_map.csv | grep "^http://domain.com"| cut

-f1 | sort | uniq -c | cut -f5 -d\/ | sort | uniq -c

|sort -nr | head -25 | tr -s " " "\t" > level1.txt

Directory Pages

news 1343

chs 833

fhs 699

cd 513

cancer 251

flu 110

Lots of Presentation Options

• Server-generated images

• HTML

• JavaScript (d3js, c3js, Raphael, Google Charts)

• Canvas

• Flash (just kidding)

• Convince Views to export JSON

– views data export, views datasource, views JSON, drupal_json_output()

– D8 will use Symfony\Component\HttpFoundation\JsonResponse

• Don’t forget Mobile

d3js turns JSON into pretty

IN CONCLUSION

Hang on, I’m almost done

Get Your DataViz Out There in Ten Easy Steps

1. Gather the data

2. Process the data (Filter, sort, pre-compute, cluster, correlate, etc.)

3. Select a presentation style (Classic, funky, map, infographic; interactive vs static)

4. Select a tool (Off the shelf? Custom built?)

5. Load the data

6. Make it beautiful

7. Test it and make it better

8. Release it & promote it

9. Keep the data updated (Daily? Yearly? Real-time?)

10. Impact the world

Resources

October 14, 2014

http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/courses

(Apologies to Mr. Tufte for my use of PowerPoint)

Resources

• Worth a Thousand Words: How to Display Health Data

• http://www.chcf.org/publications/2014/02/worth-thousand-

words-data

• For nonprofit/foundation types:

• http://dataanalystsforsocialgood.com/

• http://www.nten.org/research/collected-voices-data-informed-

nonprofits

• #npdata on Twitter

WORKSHOP

Is he going to make us talk?

Workshop

1. What story does your company or organization need to

tell?

2. Who are you trying to reach with this story?

3. What data lies behind this story?

How could this organization use data

visualization to tell this story?

Thanks for listening!

Nathan Gasser Rock River Star ngasser@rockriverstar.com