Data Stories

Hi all,

Hot topic today! We invited Alberto Cairo and Robert Kosara to discuss the role of storytelling in visualization.  What is storytelling? Is all visualization storytelling? Should we always strive for telling a story? How does storytelling match with exploratory visualization? Should we aim more for worlds and macroscopes than stories as Moritz advocated a while back at Visualized? We went on a somewhat lengthy discussion on these topics and I think we all ended up agreeing on a lot of things and developed a much more nuanced view of storytelling. As you can see from the picture we had lots of fun (thanks Robert for taking the screenshot). Fantastic chat!

Note: Alberto had a lot more to say after the episode so he decided to publish a follow up post that clarifies some of the things he said on the show. But — spoiler alert — listen to the episode first!

P.S. Big, big thanks to Fabricio Tavares for taking care of the audio editing of this episode!

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Links

• Lynn Cherny on Implied Stories (and Data Vis)
• Periscopic’s Dino Citraro on A Framework for Talking About Data Narration
• Book cited by Alberto: The Unpersuadables: Adventures with the Enemies of Science
• Great visualizations without stories (proposed by Moritz):
  • Aron Koblin’s Flight Patterns
  • Martin Wattenberg’s Map of the Market
• Moritz position on stories: Look ma, no story! | Worlds, not stories
• Enrico’s position on stories: Telling a story doesn’t tell the whole story
• Robert series on storytelling: Stories Are Gateways Into Worlds | Story: A Definition
• Robert’s mention of visualization on Copenhagen: Emissions, Treaties and Impacts
• Jessica Hallman’s VIS’13 paper on: Deeper Understanding of Sequence in Visualization