How to tell compelling stories with data

On Saturday, August 19, 2023, at 10:00 AM, the UP Data Science Society held its first mentorship workshop, “How to Tell Compelling Stories with Data,” the opening session of the series it called The First Mentorship Workshops for a Data-driven Society. The session was streamed live on the society’s Facebook page.

Speaker

Dr. Reinabelle Reyes is a data scientist and astrophysicist. She holds a doctorate in Astrophysics from Princeton University, is an Associate Professor at the National Institute of Physics, UP Diliman, and was named a 2023 Outstanding Young Scientist by the National Academy of Science and Technology.

What the workshop covered

The talk gave three pointers for a good data storyteller: tell a story, focus attention, and make your call to action. For the first, Dr. Reyes used Scott Berinato’s three-step approach, marking the setup, conflict, and resolution of a story on a chart of the global real home price index and showing how the same chart can carry two stories. For the second, she went through the preattentive attributes from Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic’s Storytelling with Data (orientation, shape, line length, line width, size, curvature, added marks, enclosure, hue, intensity, spatial position, and motion) and an example survey chart where only the low scores are colored, so the eye lands on them. For the third, she described a call to action as something that moves the audience to act on the insight, which should be SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time-bound) and aligned with the main message of the story.

On August 22, 2023, the society posted the slides from the workshop, which Dr. Reyes shared with the members.

Follow-up

On November 27, 2023, the society announced a second mentorship workshop for those who missed the August session, How to formulate and strategize data-driven solutions for community problems with Engr. Syrus Gomari, on November 28, 2023, streamed the same way.