Data Storytelling
john kamau
data storytelling
“Visualization gives you answers to questions you didn’t know you had.” – Ben Schneiderman
Data storytelling and visualization
Data visualization is a topic most might consider technical and an area more suited for the statistically inclined, however, visualizations appear everywhere even in normal life, on newspapers we have infographics, on social media, and other forms of media, therefore, a study of them is never in vain? Humans love stories, we have been telling oral narratives since antiquity, passing our myths and legends long before they invented writing on clay tablets and later in print media. One of the interesting things about stories is that they have a well-defined structure more formalized in ‘the hero's journey template, Campbell(1949).
The template reduces all stories to three acts, departure, initiation, and returns where our hero is moved from their ordinary life, taken to a world of fantasy to face the trials, and returns empowered to his former life never to be the same again. One of the best implementations of this template is Plato's ‘allegory of the cave’ which defines who a philosopher king was to define justice, the king is a man removed from the world of shadows and shown the grandeur of the sun and then forced back to the shadow world.
The combination of these two is the field of data storytelling that takes complex statistical concepts and weaves a narrative around them to ease the consumption of the results of the visual inquiry.
night tingale coxcombs
Data stories in record
One of the oldest applications of visualizations was Nightingale's Coxcombs or pie charts that she designed with William Farr to show the number of preventable deaths during the Crimean Wars. She proved that there were a large number of deaths happening in the hospitals due to lack of sanitation, and helped hospitals begin the cleanliness standards we see today in our hospitals. Around the same time, in 1854, Snow Johnson, a doctor by profession, plotted the number of cholera deaths in London following an outbreak.
He was able to prove that the largest number of deaths happened around a water pump effectively proving that cholera was waterborne but also the need for sanitation as a measure against the disease.
Charles Joseph Minard is another great data storyteller, a civil engineer who is well-versed in data and visualizations. He depicted the great losses that Napoleon suffered on his march to Russia, the thick brown line shows the large number of soldiers that he started with while the thin black line shows the soldiers that retreated after suffering losses.
Brown means to advance and black retreat, the small line graph below shows the temperatures. In a single graph, he was able to communicate the tragedy that befell the army on that unfortunate march.
carle Figurative
A more contemporary hero of data visualization is Francis Anscombe who in 1972 proved the value of data visualization using what is referred to as the Anscombe quartet. This was in a period where the belief was that analytical statistics was a better representation of data findings than visualizations. Anscombe showed four very different data that had nearly identical descriptive statistics (Mean, median, standard deviation, and so on) that could fool even regression results and yet when plotted they look very different.
The final visualization guru is Prof Hans Rosling who founded the Gapminder organization that has data on the wealth and health of all countries in the world since the 1950s. He created an interactive bubble chart that shows how wealth has changed over the years using his technology called Trendalyzer. For more of his plots, you can visit the Gapminder website at Gapminder
Gapminder
Conclusion
There are many ways to tell a data story, not all related to common plots, sometimes infographics work best though these are for one-time use only. Visualizations can save lives like in the case of Nightingale and John Snow, They can inform like in the case of Hans Rosling and Anscombe and can tell tales of tragedy in the case of Napoleon's march. I hope that the reader gained at least a bit of knowledge on data visualization, the justification, the methods, and the impact that it can bring.
John Kamau
Numbers don't lie, but this guy tells stories with them! John Kamau isn't your average data whiz. Sure, he's got the degrees (economics and data science, no less!), but his experience is where things get interesting. For three years, he wrangled numbers like a financial accountant ninja. Then, for seven years, he became a data analyst extraordinaire, leading the data charge for three years at L-IFT (we'll let him explain that one!). What does all this mean? John can predict cash flow like a fortune teller with a spreadsheet, build credit scoring models that make banks jealous, and unearth insights from data that would make Aesop's fables blush. As a co-founder of Aesops, John isn't just crunching numbers; he's using his skills to craft impactful solutions for Kenyans. Think of him as the data Robin Hood, taking insights from the rich (data) and giving them to the people (Kenyans) to make a real difference.
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