Reflections

This post was originally published on the Urban Institute’s blog, Urban Wire on March 20, 2019. Major League Baseball’s (MLB) Opening Day is less than two weeks away. For fans like me, it’s a glorious day of blue skies, green…

This was the question posed to a group of 15 academic researchers across several social science fields at a recent conference I attended. As a researcher whose role is to help others improve how they communicate their work, I thought…

A few years ago, I had a slew of meetings all in a row where different people kept asking me to help them make a map. “I have some state-level data,” they’d say, “can you help me make a map?”…

Well, my week of data and story posts has come to an end. And today I head off to Pamplona, Spain for what I expect will be an incredible and exhausting week at the Malofiej Infographic World Summit. I’ll be…

So far in this series of posts on stories, I’ve discussed the definition of story, story structure, and applying data to story structure. In this final post, I look at the differences between analyzing data and talking to people and…

In my last couple of posts, I discussed my definition of story and story structure. As people engaged with data and trying to visualize those data, we often say, “Let’s tell a story with these data,” and in the end, we…

Once upon a time, there was _____. Every day, _____. One day, _____. Because of that, _____. Because of that, _____. Until finally_____. This is just one of the famous 22 Rules of Storytelling from Pixar, shared by Pixar Story…

People who work with and communicate data tend to throw around the words “story” and “data” a lot these days. We say all too regularly, “Let’s tell a story with these data” or “What story do these data tell us?”…