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Six Ways to Tap Into Your Inner Storyteller

Lesson 8 from: Data Storytelling: Deliver Insights via Compelling Stories

Bill Shander

Six Ways to Tap Into Your Inner Storyteller

Lesson 8 from: Data Storytelling: Deliver Insights via Compelling Stories

Bill Shander

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Lesson Info

8. Six Ways to Tap Into Your Inner Storyteller

Lesson Info

Six Ways to Tap Into Your Inner Storyteller

let's tap into your inner storyteller, but Bill, I'm not creative. You say, I couldn't tell a story to save my life. You say, I disagree seriously, we're all trained and experienced storytellers. You do it all the time if you fish, you know immediately what I'm talking about, right? Yeah. Every time you tell the story of that fish that you caught that one time off the coast of wherever it gets bigger and bigger and the seas get rougher and the beer gets warmer and the fish gets even bigger. You think about how to hook your listener pun, intended right to pull them into a story to pull them further along for that bigger payoff. But Bill you say telling data stories isn't so easy, it's easier to spin a tale about an epic fishing success than it is to turn quarterly widget sales figures into a narrative. Once again I say I disagree, I'm not just gonna declare that anything can be turned into a narrative, but I am going to teach you six structures you can use to turn something abstract and...

without form into a narrative, your audience can latch onto with their caveman brains. The first and probably most important technique you can use is to make your story human, make it about people or one person preferably rather than data. Let's say you had fire safety data for instance, data about the odds of surviving a fire based on different criteria like proximity to a fire station. The presence of fire extinguishers, smoke detectors, sprinkler systems, the age and mobility of residents in the building etcetera. You could certainly just write some very factual text summarizing that data and include some charts to visualize it and be done. Or you could tell a story. Susan jones was dreaming about helping her son attache's boat near for his upcoming prom. When the ceiling caved in on her master bedroom, she woke in a panic aware that there was a smell in the air but unable to identify it for the first few seconds once she realized it was smoke and she felt the heat of the flames which were sending sparks out of the bathroom window toward the stars. She shot out of bed screaming to her husband and kids to run out of the house dot dot dot. That specific example is enough to hook your reader into story mode. They want to find out what happens next. Now, if it turned out that Susan's house was built in 1920 and the wiring had never been updated or if it described her running into her bathroom grabbing one of her eight fire extinguishers and saving the house in the family or some other similar anecdote that would be a natural transition to go from the individual story to the collective data. And you could circle back and forth between Susan's story and the matching data or we even other stories in the same way. Making it human is about making the abstract real turning collections of numbers into one tangible thing and it's about making it accessible. People care a lot less about a group of people a categorization than they do about one person with a face, a name and other characteristics that are recognizable, memorable and that probably conjure up images of people that they know and love. Another narrative technique I call exclaim and explain the basic idea here is that a story can start with an exclamation of hypothesis, a statement of some kind and the rest of the story can be a series of logical explanations for that. Exclamation. A good example of this is Bloomberg's what's really warming the world. Interactive data story first, the exclamation skeptics of man made climate change offer various natural causes to explain why the earth has warmed 1.4 degrees Fahrenheit since 18 80. But can these account for the planet's rising temperature, scroll down to see how much different factors, both natural and industrial contribute to global warming. Based on findings from Nasa's Goddard Institute for Space Studies. And that exclamation is then followed by a series of charts addressing each point the skeptics might make. So as I start to scroll through the experience just very briefly, the first thing comes up. The first explanation is that the Earth's orbit right? The earth wobbles on its axis and that can affect temperature and they show the computer models and what they would predict would happen with temperature based on the orbital changes of the earth. I scroll again, is it the sun same thing. The skin's temperature varies over decades and centuries, it says. And again I see the computer model and I go again and again. Is it volcanoes or is it all three of those things combined And the animation and the experience reveals what the computer models would predict based on those natural factors. And then once again it's things that are caused by man deforestation. Is it ozone pollution, aerosol? And then we conclude with no, it really is greenhouse gasses. And we can see the progression and the data is revealed to us. The point here is that there is an exclamation at the beginning and then the explanation throughout the story. The explanation for the exclamation, straightforward right? The next approach is all about using your storytelling to build anticipation and mystery before revealing what it's all about at the end or at least after ample suspense building. For instance, in this very famous interactive story from the new york times called Snowfall. This example represents a watershed in interactive storytelling and how the times handled the text and maps and videos and other content in a very dynamic way. But even without any of the groundbreaking design and user experience, this is excellent storytelling. The snow burst through the trees with no warning but a last second wash of sound. A two story wall of white and chris Rudolph's piercing cry avalanche release. The very thing. The 16 skiers and snowboarders had sought fresh soft snow instantly became the enemy Somewhere above a pristine meadow cracked in the shape of a lightning bolt Slicing a slab nearly 200 ft across and three ft deep gravity did the rest snow shattered and spilled down the slope. Within seconds, the avalanche was the size of more than 1000 cars barreling down the mountain and weighing millions of pounds, Moving about 70 mph. It crashed through the sturdy old growth trees, snapping their limbs and shredding bark from their trunks. The avalanche in Washington's cascades in february, slid past some trees and rocks like ocean swells around a ship's prow. Others are captured and added to his violent load. Somewhere inside it also carried people. How many? No one knew this is pure suspense as I'm reading. I know I'm going to find out later what this is all about, but the first thing the story does is hook me in. It makes me want to know more. This is also using the technique of making it human of course this is a story about people, not the story of an avalanche alone. All of these storytelling techniques I'm listening can and should be combined. We humans live in a world that includes time as an inescapable dimension. So things happen to us one step at a time and we hear about these things from each other. One word at a time. As I said in the last video stories are linear. So to tell a story about things happening over time, you can easily just tell a story in the exact order that had happened or just following the chronology of the story. This is the story of Eric Duncan, the first person diagnosed with Ebola in America during the outbreak in 2014. The story is a simple explanation of the last few days of his life tracking just a few data points from his time at the hospital in texas where he died. So for instance, I can see his heart rate, his temperature and his respiration rate. After a short introduction to the story. And as I scroll down, you'll see, I can see day by day what's happening and you'll notice the data at the top changes. So we see his heart rate and his temperature change day by day. As I scroll through, there's some other data points as well, including his pain level notes on what was happening on the floor as well as some other iconography to indicate some other things. But the main point here is this is a chronological story. Data driven in a very simple format. It's a simple linear story of a slice in time in one person's life. But it is a data story at its heart. The next story technique is called problem solution, which is pretty self explanatory first present a problem, then present the solution. Although it's not always problems solution, it can be thought of as effect cause really meaning that you talk about the effect of something and then your explanation, your story goes through the cause for that effect. For instance, in this example from the new york times explaining the improvements in driving safety over the decades despite massive increases in miles driven per capita. It starts with a clear introduction to the effect being reported that traffic fatalities are down and then says that this is despite massive increases in how much we drive. The accompanying chart is an interesting visual form and that it's a scatter plot tracking two variables miles driven and driving fatalities. But it's also telling a linear story by showing the years but it's doing something interesting in that the years are not on the X axis, which is where we normally expect to see time displayed instead the years are the dots themselves so they do weird things like make our line, which is not a traditional line chart flip back on itself, revealing interesting insights. But the main point here is that as you read the chart from left to right, continuing along the story path, you're presented with labels, explanations and many stories helping provide the context like the cause for the effect that began our story. So while the muscle car era led to an increase in fatalities that was followed by the energy crisis seatbelts, airbags and other factors that have caused fatalities to drop and drop and drop over recent decades. This storytelling does a lot of things, including helping us understand what might otherwise be a confusing chart. Finally, one of my favorite ways to approach a story is what I call Six Ways to sunday. Sometimes you just want to tell a story explaining something from every single angle you can think of. It's not exactly a linear story and it can be sort of like the last one and that it can be all about every possible explanation for an effect or like in this example, it's just looking at a question from as many angles as you can, letting your data and story overwhelm your audience with its completeness but following a logical path to do So this is often a good approach to using examples like this one where the author is trying to explain a large number in this case the human population, we have a really hard time understanding large numbers and this is a great approach to use for this kind of challenge Because you can throw a bunch of metaphors and ideas of people in the hope that at least one or two will stick. So for instance, the headline is 7.3 billion people one building. And so you know, the whole point here is you need to fit all of the humans on earth into one building, how big would it be. And so that's sort of the opening premise and as you scroll down, you can see that the story here starts off with, if we're all the size of a grain of rice, it would be a building about the size of a house as you can see here. But if you look at it from different directions, let's say, we talked about 7.3 billion humans in one dimensional configurations. As he says, meaning if we put them all in a line, how much space would it take, or if we put them all on top of each other, how much space would it take? And he goes through this entire process to show us that if that's the Earth and then that's the moon's orbit, that human circle, the length would be way out there in terms of size. So for some people, that's gonna be an easy way to think about the size of the human population. And if you go further down it's more and more and more of the same. So how many people could fit into different sized spaces? You know, we could fit the entire human population into this one little red square in this little island that's off the coast of Norway in that case. Or if we put this many people around it would take five hours to walk around a square of this size. And this just, you know, comes at it again and again and again from all these different directions. Uh and really goes off in different tangents, looking at, you know, categorizing people, looking at how many people are dead versus live and how big those numbers are, etcetera. This is what six ways to Sunday is all about. I know this was a long lesson, but I think these six ways of thinking about stories will help you to tap into your storytelling mojo. Just think about explaining things in one of these ways. And you'll be surprised at how you can assemble a series of thoughts and ideas into a story structure using these as your guide and don't forget to feel free to combine them a human centered mystery before history. Story is awesome as is a chronological problem solution story. You get my drift coming up next. The importance of understanding your audience, you have to know who you're speaking to to know what kind of a story to tell and how to tell it.

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