John Coltrane, the great jazz saxophonist, drew a staff on a fogged-over window. Then he drew notes. Then he played the notes.
That’s the story. The notes were the data.
storytelling
Do data and stories make an odd couple?
Who’s the boss around here? Is it data? Or is it stories? I say stories. But a friend and fellow writer in the data industry sees special status for data. It’s not just another fact like any other humanity has used as ready fodder for stories, he seems to say. It is like a compass, pointing us to truth, just truth.
We spent a significant part of a Sunday afternoon — him in Nashville and me near Berkeley, and sunny in both places — slinging text messages back and forth. Then it began again on Monday.
Steve Swoyer worries, in short, that stories demand drama of data that data may not be able to provide with integrity.… Read the rest “Do data and stories make an odd couple?”
First comes the data story, then comes the shadow
Nothing interesting goes without simultaneous celebration and condemnation. Back in 2008 when I wrote that “Tableau is the new Apple,” data visualization was widely pooh-poohed. “Pretty pictures,” I heard so many say.
Now the pretty boy is data storytelling. “Cue the data storytellers,” which ran in Information Management the other day, got a good round of tweets (62 by Wednesday night). But the few complaints were also fun.
It’s easy to brush off the silly stuff. One self-identified data scientist grumbled in a tweet the morning “Cue” appeared, “We don’t need more storytellers … We need more talent.”… Read the rest “First comes the data story, then comes the shadow”