1. Conversations With Data –
An Introduction to Finding and Telling
Stories With Data
Tony Hirst / @psychemedia
2. Topical
Trends
Story
Maps
Story
Lines
Parts of
Wholes
Where’s
the Data?
Network
Maps
Raising
the Bar
Crazy
Correlations
Virtually
Yours
Keeping
Note
Conversations
With Data
Paradox
Inside?
3. Topical
Trends
Story
Maps
Story
Lines
Parts of
Wholes
Where’s
the Data?
Network
Maps
Raising
the Bar
Crazy
Correlations
Virtually
Yours
Keeping
Note
Conversations
With Data
Paradox
Inside?
6. Topical
Trends
Story
Maps
Story
Lines
Parts of
Wholes
Where’s
the Data?
Network
Maps
Raising
the Bar
Crazy
Correlations
Virtually
Yours
Keeping
Note
Conversations
With Data
Paradox
Inside?
8. Topical
Trends
Story
Maps
Story
Lines
Parts of
Wholes
Where’s
the Data?
Network
Maps
Raising
the Bar
Crazy
Correlations
Virtually
Yours
Keeping
Note
Conversations
With Data
Paradox
Inside?
10. Topical
Trends
Story
Maps
Story
Lines
Parts of
Wholes
Where’s
the Data?
Network
Maps
Raising
the Bar
Crazy
Correlations
Virtually
Yours
Keeping
Note
Conversations
With Data
Paradox
Inside?
12. Parts of Wholes
“The idea [of
#Vennfest] was
essentially to lay
political jokes over the
format of a Venn
diagram. The
punchline would be in
the intersection of the
two sets.”
– Martin Belam
13. Topical
Trends
Story
Maps
Story
Lines
Parts of
Wholes
Where’s
the Data?
Network
Maps
Raising
the Bar
Crazy
Correlations
Virtually
Yours
Keeping
Note
Conversations
With Data
Paradox
Inside?
15. Topical
Trends
Story
Maps
Story
Lines
Parts of
Wholes
Where’s
the Data?
Network
Maps
Raising
the Bar
Crazy
Correlations
Virtually
Yours
Keeping
Note
Conversations
With Data
Paradox
Inside?
17. Topical
Trends
Story
Maps
Story
Lines
Parts of
Wholes
Where’s
the Data?
Network
Maps
Raising
the Bar
Crazy
Correlations
Virtually
Yours
Keeping
Note
Conversations
With Data
Paradox
Inside?
19. Topical
Trends
Story
Maps
Story
Lines
Parts of
Wholes
Where’s
the Data?
Network
Maps
Raising
the Bar
Crazy
Correlations
Virtually
Yours
Keeping
Note
Conversations
With Data
Paradox
Inside?
22. Topical
Trends
Story
Maps
Story
Lines
Parts of
Wholes
Where’s
the Data?
Network
Maps
Raising
the Bar
Crazy
Correlations
Virtually
Yours
Keeping
Note
Conversations
With Data
Paradox
Inside?
24. Topical
Trends
Story
Maps
Story
Lines
Parts of
Wholes
Where’s
the Data?
Network
Maps
Raising
the Bar
Crazy
Correlations
Virtually
Yours
Keeping
Note
Conversations
With Data
Paradox
Inside?
26. Topical
Trends
Story
Maps
Story
Lines
Parts of
Wholes
Where’s
the Data?
Network
Maps
Raising
the Bar
Crazy
Correlations
Virtually
Yours
Keeping
Note
Conversations
With Data
Paradox
Inside?
28. Topical
Trends
Story
Maps
Story
Lines
Parts of
Wholes
Where’s
the Data?
Network
Maps
Raising
the Bar
Crazy
Correlations
Virtually
Yours
Keeping
Note
Conversations
With Data
Paradox
Inside?
30. Topical
Trends
Story
Maps
Story
Lines
Parts of
Wholes
Where’s
the Data?
Network
Maps
Raising
the Bar
Crazy
Correlations
Virtually
Yours
Keeping
Note
Conversations
With Data
Paradox
Inside?
The approach I thought I’d take when putting this session together was to come up with a series of hopefully entertaining activities that would get you thinking about the ways in which we can use data and data inspired visualisations to identify, illustrate or tell different stories. There are also some activities that relate to workflows, or sources of data, which are also important when it comes to working with data.
We’re a mixed audience, so which activities we do depends on you…
There isn’t time to do each activity – each one takes 10 minutes or so, so if you want to try an activity that we don’t have time for today, you’ll have to invite me back for an awayday or bit of light relief at your department meeting – or I can describe the activity to you so you can run it yourself.
There are several ways we can play this session…
The “topical trends” activity: how could you make use of a tool like Google Trends or Google Ngram viewer in your course, either in production or as a student activity? What patterns would you be looking to discover, and how would you develop these discoveries?
The world has rhythms, social as well as physical. And whilst we may like to think as ourselves as individuals, the patterns of our own behaviour often track those of many others.
It is highly likely that all of out students will be familiar with the Google web search engine, so can we use that in data – rather than websearch – ways?
Google Trends is a tool that shows relative volumes of search term usage over time. Search volumes for a single word or phrase can be displayed, or volumes for several terms compared directly with each other.
Another tool published by Google is the Ngram viewer. Ngrams here refer to word combinations as phrases – a bigram is 2 words that appear together in a sentence: “a bigram” is a bigram; “bigram is” is a bigram; and so on. The Google Ngram viewer is a view onto an Ngram database compiled from books published over the last two hundred years. Searching for a word or phrase charts usage – in terms of occurrence, or volume – of that word or phrase within the corpus.
I briefly introduced the idea of story maps this morning…
A story map can be used to illustrate a sequence of events that have a physical location by playing through the events, one event at a time, with the location of the event displayed on a map along with a description of the event, and perhaps an image as well.
A simply story map is constructed from line items that at their simplest describe: a location, and some text to describe the event. A two column spreadsheet will do it.
Line charts are one of the most familiar types are charts – but have you ever put yourself on the line, and tried to replay the story it tells?
One of my favourite illustrations of how lines can tell stories is given by this example of cult science fiction author Kurt Vonnegut talking about the Shapes of Stories…
If you want to see some examples, and perhaps try a few of your own, pick this option…
Several chart types relate to illustration the partial composition of a whole…
Pie charts – you’ll all be familiar with pie charts, even though they should only ever be used sparingly, and NEVER, EVER IN 3D RELIEF…
Or with pointless colourings, such as used in the example on the right here…
Perhaps you fancy trying to create some of these charts yourself..?
Or maybe you prefer to consider how parts of various wholes overlap, as illustrated by a Venn diagram. Could you tell a joke using a Venn diagram, do you think…?
Bar charts may be simple, but how many ways can you think of portraying them?
Bar charts – most notably when cast in the form of a histogram – are area proportional charts: the area of the bar is what we take as a the signal related to the value of the quantity being visualised.
When values are represented using circles, it is important to use the area of the circle as the scaled quantity, not the radius or diameter. This recent example shows, on the left, circles scaled by the radius of the circle, with the correct area based (that is, square of the radius value) representation on the right.
This further refinement of the same graphic shows how the two values can be compared.
On the left, each column is rank ordered and lines connect similar items, offering a direct columnar or column based comparison.
On the right, the ordering is according to the rank order of the right hand column,, allowing direct comparison across the rows.