Data Storytellers - Where is the magic in your data story?

The entire human experience through centuries is founded on storytelling. From the first gestures and expressions, written symbols, folktales and legends, all the way to the modern articles online, tweets, e-books and news. We owe our evolution to storytelling.

In the new Digital Economy, where everything is related to data, data storytelling is the next evolution of how we tell stories. The phrase “data storytelling” has been associated with many things—data visualizations, infographics, dashboards, data presentations, and so on. Too often data storytelling is interpreted as just visualizing data effectively, however, it is much more than just creating visually-appealing data charts. According to Brent Dykes, Contributor at Forbes, data storytelling is a structured approach for communicating data insights, and it involves a combination of three key elements: data, visuals, and narrative.

• When narrative is coupled with data, it helps to explain to your audience what’s happening in the data and why a particular insight is important.
• When visuals are applied to data, they can enlighten the audience to insights that they wouldn’t see without charts or graphs.
• Finally, when narrative and visuals are merged together, they can engage or even entertain an audience.

Why is it important and how is related to you?

“The ability to take data - to be able to understand it, to process it, to extract value from it, to visualize it, to communicate it - that’s going to be a hugely important skill in the next decades.” - Dr. Hal R.Varian

If you are thinking that data storytelling is important only for data scientists, practitioners working with analysis, statistics, content creation and so on, you are wrong. Next time when you enter the meeting to present your report, have a sales meeting with your client, working on your new product or website, pitch a venture capitalist to invest in your idea, present on a conference, or simply have a performance meeting with your manager, it will all come down to the data you present, and how do you effectively tell the story of that data, so the counterpart can understand it .

Here is what google trends has to say about it (Numbers represent search interest relative to the highest point on the chart for the given region and time. A value of 100 is the peak popularity for the term. A value of 50 means that the term is half as popular. Likewise a score of 0 means the term was less than 1% as popular as the peak).

As Data Storytelling is increasing in popularity, there is an obvious need for us to understand what are the prerequisites for becoming a good Data Storyteller.

Few months back I met Thomas Nord, CEO of Knowit Decision Helikopter AB, to discuss this topic. After an interesting discussion and sharing experiences, we decided that we need to do something on this area. The outcome of that discussion is Data Storytellers 2017 - an unparalleled educational and knowledge sharing theater-event like you have never seen or experienced in the past.Or at least we have not done before.

This event is tailor made for any professional who wants to learn to communicate data effectively. From practitioners working with analysis, data science, statistics, content creation all the way to managers, leaders, employees who want to learn and improve their narrative, visualisation, reporting and communication skills.

As we wanted to grasp all the key elements of Data Storytelling ( narrative, data, visualisation, communication, practice) we invites some of the best practitioners that we could find.

• Using photos as data to understand how people live - Anna Rosling R?nnlund, GapMinder Foundation
• How to tell a story - Carin Gerhaldsen, Swedish crime writer
• Where does data storytelling fit into the broader landscape of data exploration, visualization, and presentation? - Diego Galar, Lule? University of Technology
• How to not accidentally create data visualizations that lie - Nick Desbarats, Perceptual Edge
• The Language of Data Storytelling – The Art of Telling Stories and Avoiding Fairy Tales - David Svensson, Knowit & Pia Falkborn, Knowit

The Premiere is on 23rd of May at the Vasa Theater in Stockholm. The event starts at 15:00 and continues until 20:00.

Everyone working with data or eager to learn storytelling is welcome. The registration is now open. Visit: www.data-storytellers.com for more info.

Join us for an afternoon full of ideas, knowledge sharing, provocative thoughts, fun, networking opportunity and drama.