Storytelling with Data: A Data Visualization Guide for Business Professionals

"Yes, like Nathan Yau, she’s working out there by herself, and gives short courses and does consulting on data-related matters. She also has a fantastic podcast called ‘ Storytelling with Data ’. One of the things she hits on is the design aspect of data analysis. Yau really focuses on visualization and presentation. Knaflic takes it a bit more broadly, and focuses on things like the audience who’s going to be on the receiving end of the analysis or report. It’s important to think in terms of what they need, and what would be best for them among the many choices you could make when analysing data. Another important idea of hers is to develop a narrative in data presentation. When doing data analysis, you’re creating many options for yourself by creating hundreds of plots, fitting thousands of models looking at different aspects of the data. But towards the end, you have to synthesize all that into something coherent. When students learn this process, I’ve often seen them come with a 50-page printout of everything that the software produced, but in reality they’ll have to find a way to reduce that to a set of three or four pages. The way you do that is by building a narrative that goes from A to B to C to D. Once you can figure out what that story is, then you can pick the plots and tables that help you with that. Some of the references in the book even come from ‘actual’ writing, such as screenwriting. It’s an element that we often forget when teaching data science, by pretending that you’re done once you’ve understood the models and their output. In a way, the output of a data analysis is three quarters of the way to the end. The final quarter is selecting the various things that you’ve done and building a final ‘data product’ from them. This is true even if you’re not writing a paper or presenting to the CEO. Even if you’re just turning to your neighbor or sending an email to somebody, there is a process of ‘dimension reduction’ that occurs, whereby you’re selecting among the various things that you’ve done to only present a few of them."