http://flowingdata.com/2011/11/04/telling-stories-with-data-visweek-2011/

• Jerome Cukier, OECD
• Steven Drucker, Microsoft Research
• Jo Guldi, Harvard
• Brad Stenger, New York Times
• Sunah Suh, University of Illinois
• Lance Weiler, Filmmaker
• Wesley Willett, UC-Berkeley

Read about them here!

While visualization is an excellent tool for discovery and analysis, it is also a powerful medium for communication. The best information graphics do more than just present numbers: they tell a story, engage and convince their readers, invite them to make a personal connection to the data, and help them tell stories of their own.

This VisWeek 2011 workshop will examine the construction of narratives with visualization. We plan to draw participants with interests in visualization, social media, journalism, and storytellers.

Last year, at VisWeek 2010, the first workshop on ‘Telling Stories with Data’ took place in Salt Lake City.  This workshop brought together dozens of visualization researchers, journalists, humanities scholars, and tool builders to talk about how data has the potential to promote increasingly sophisticated and data-literate conversations to the world at large.

Continuing another iteration of ‘Telling Stories with Data’ is important because for many years, the infovis community has focused on discovery and analysis as a core goal of our research. While the use of visualization in presentation has long been part of our inquiry, we believe that such communication-minded visualization is an increasingly important topic. The flexibility and universality of the web has enabled interactive visualization to function as a popular medium, finding a foothold in contexts such as interactive features in popular newspapers and social network apps that visualize users’ activity.

A key component of communication-minded visualization is storytelling: the construction of a narrative that is founded upon and illustrated by data. When average web users encounter visualization, it is typically presented as part of a narrative, such as a blog post or news article. When a user creates or shares a visualization, it is often with the intention of sharing a story of their own. The data this user visualizes may be personal, communal, or public; regardless, the visual representation of the data is a critical component of their narrative. Designers and users of visualizations alike rely on techniques for narrating or framing presented information though many of these techniques are not captured by traditional infovis design guidance. Conventions for telling stories with data carry the potential to shape data interpretations in consistent ways. Understanding how data and storytelling interact deepens knowledge of visualization, as it is through storytelling that people structure and share the insights they glean from visualizations. We believe social media are powerful vehicles for users to define and tell these stories.

Please join us in Providence in October 2011 to explore these issues and more at the next iteration of ‘Telling Stories with Data’!  Please read over the goals and topics of our workshop, as well as how to participate.

–Adam, Jessica, Joan, Karrie, and Nicholas.

Joan DiMicco (@joandimicco) is a research scientist and manager of IBM’s Visual Communication Lab.

Jessica Hullman is a Ph.D. student at the University of Michigan School of Information.

Karrie Karahalios(@kkarahal)  is an associate professor in computer science at the University of Illinois where she heads the Social Spaces Group.

Adam Perer (@adamperer) is a research scientist in IBM’s Visual Communication Lab.

Read more about the organizers.

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