Charting a story

Dear Story,

I hear you. The structure and narrative of stories can drive impact and change.

For example, many people think that data storytelling is all about visualization. But just sprinkling charts on a power point does not lead to insight or impact. Great data storytellers, well, they tell stories, with data. Where insight plays a key role. So does narrative.

Let me share a few examples.

Once upon a time, not a very long time ago, there were no fancy visualization tools. There was no term called infographics. No one had heard of big data or data science. But there were people who told beautiful data stories. People who created visualizations that drove change and impact.4 lessons from the past:

1.?Florence Nightingale – The Lady with the Lamp or a passionate statistician?

The year was 1858. War had claimed the lives of thousands of soldiers in the battlefield and then there were those who lost their lives fighting other battles with threatening but preventable diseases. Florence Nightingale was on a mission to drive change in healthcare practices. And the authorities wanted data. In one single chart, Florence Nightingale managed to show the impact of death from various causes and drive home the need for preventive health care to battle the diseases which claimed many more lives than war did. The key was the insight it showed that it was not the war but the preventable diseases causing more deaths. And that this was an area where action could be taken with focus on nursing.

Imagine the graph being charted again today, centuries later. Would preventable diseases still be the leading cause of death?

2. Who do we owe our line charts and bar charts to? A visionary or a scoundrel?

The line charts and the bar charts that we today liberally sprinkle on our dashboards, often in places where they may not even be needed, were the invention of one man. William Playfair.

A man who did not have such a level playing field in his own colourful and eventful life. From what is known of his life, he pursued a multitude of passions with equal enthusiasm including - millwright, engineer, draftsman, accountant, inventor, silversmith, merchant, investment broker, economist, statistician, pamphleteer, translator, publicist, land speculator, convict, banker, ardent royalist, journalist, editor, and blackmailer.

A classic polymath or a rougue inventor? Little is known about the life and times of this person. But in between his myriad activities, he manage to sneak in time to develop the line and the bar charts. Raising the bar and charting the graphic future for centuries!

3.?Would Hitler have changed his Russia attack plans if he had seen this chart?

The year was 1869. The inspiration - Napoleon’s disastrous attack on Russia. The creator of the visual– Charles Minardi, a French engineer.

No wonder Edward Tufte (father of modern visualization) called this visualization the most powerful one of all times. One chart which tells the story of the thousands who went charging into Russia, the route they took, the time taken for the battle, the temperature differences they endured along the way and the few hundreds that came shivering back. Would history have been different, if Hitler saw this in time?

4. Visualization - A Tool for a Rebel Doctor?

The year was 1854. The popular belief - Cholera spread from the air. And one doctor, Dr. John Snow, who dared to think different (yes, a real life John Snow before the fictional Game of Thrones one). He wrote academic papers to prove his hypothesis that the disease actually spread from water; but no one listened. No one listened, till he proved it with this one powerful diagram along with a crisp narrative that showed a cluster of cholera outbreak cases near one septic water tank. One of the earliest examples of using histograms on a physical map. Today, we can replicate this easily in Tableau/Qlikview and more. Statistics and visualization at its powerful best.

4 visionaries. 4 rebels. 4 powerful data stories. Inspiration even today? Data visualization has now been democratized thanks to a host of tools and platforms. Interactivity, graphics have brought in new dimensions to the world of visualization. But in the clutter of visualization that seek to hold our attention, the ones that stand out, are still the ones that tell a powerful story. For as Al Shalloway said, only too eloquently, “Visualizations act as a campfire around which we gather to tell stories.” May the stories live everafter.