Now and then a data analyst pipes up with a warning about storytelling. It’s a menace, they say. It’s so potent, they say, that it stands to corrupt even data, the twenty-first century’s supposedly immaculate compass.
Most recently, that corruption touched even a hackathon involving Canadian women’s rugby, as documented in a recent blog post. In “The Dangerous Allure of the Narrative,” Oscar Goodloe spells out how narrative seduced him and his fellow hackers.
Toward the end of a “lighthearted hackathon,” he and his data analytics team realized their results were invalid. They blamed the irresistible influence of storytelling.
The competition began as competing analytics teams received a set of data.… Read the rest “The story made me do it Scapegoating data storytelling to cover bad data analysis
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