Dan Gastineau, practice leader for Visual Analytics at Aspirent, recently published “How to Use Storytelling Conventions to Create Better Visualizations” in Nightingale, Medium’s online journal of the Data Visualization Society. Throughout the article, Dan breaks down the storytelling frameworks of movie classics like The Karate Kid and Back to the Future and applies them to data visualization. Dan writes, “Story is the best form of communication we have. Although occasionally used to mislead and manipulate, stories are not the problem; false stories are. The goal of the analyst, then, is not to avoid stories, but to tell better ones. Not only is story an effective way to communicate, for the data analyst it is unavoidable, because every presentation of data tells a story whether it is intended or not. If the story isn’t made explicit, the audience will make one up.”
