Data Storytelling

We create an estimated 1.7 megabytes of data per second. As the abundance and ubiquity of data grow exponentially, data analysis and data-driven insights have become a part of most organizations’ tool kits. Our world is driven by data and facts. However, gathering and analyzing data is not enough. You must be able to communicate insights from the data that are meaningful, memorable and move your audience to action.

Combining elements of data science, visualization and storytelling, Data Storytelling is the art of telling effective data stories. Purdue’s Data Storytelling program covers concepts borrowed from rhetoric, communication, narrative structure, data research, data analysis, visualization techniques, and data ethics. Students will learn to convey original insights and research results in such a way that the audience will not only remember but learn from and want to apply in their lives and in their society.

This program is a series of four courses available 100% online. The courses are self-paced and you have 12 weeks of access to complete them. Students can register for the courses individually, or purchase all four to earn a Data Storytelling certificate from Purdue. Data Storytelling 101 is a free course that must be taken before you start any of the other paid courses. The registration deadline for the fall semester is August 17, 2020.

Data Storytelling Courses Available

Data Storytelling 101

This free course offers an introduction to the concept of Data Storytelling, why it matters, and how it can transform the results of your research into impactful narratives from which your audience learns new things, remembers important findings, and acts on them. This course must be taken before you start any of the other paid courses.

• Provide examples and justify all core techniques in storytelling, including challenging prior assumptions, providing alternative explanations, balancing timing versus immediacy, and transforming each story into a teachable moment.

Building Causal Data Stories

This course teaches students how to think about research – from data collection to data analysis to reporting results – as a narrative process. Rooted in basic statistics, the course provides students who have some numeric literacy a clear and direct path for advancing from reportable results to stories with impact. Students will especially learn how to construct numeric stories that demonstrate causality.

• Enumerate and defend the core relationships between research design and story-building, as well as define a valid causal inference and possible fallacies.
• Generate hypotheses based on data, explain how the hypotheses could be tested, and show how to translate different experimental designs and data pools into stories

Narrative Visualization

This course provides key strategies to visualize results and enhance visual communication of data stories, followed by a deeper dive into how to go from analysis of results to a compelling story enhanced with visuals.

• Create specific data visualizations that carry forward casual narratives, such as stacked bar charts, time series, and multidimensional causal chains, using effective and recognized visual and charting building blocks.
• Become familiar with how to avoid common pitfalls in designing visual content with narrative goals.
• Identify story elements that map onto the five narrative techniques learned and demonstrate through written compositions the ability to use them effectively.

Data Storytelling as an Ethical Choice

In this course, students learn how to create data stories that use ethical research and protect basic human rights: autonomy, fairness, trust, beneficence, and nonmalevolence.

• Define and use appropriate checks and reasoning processes for ensuring data transparency, validity, and ethical use.
• Identify the effect of a story by the amount of belief change it induces in an audience, determine the threshold of significance for various audiences, and use the amount and type of learning for each story to predict the degree to which it could be an actionable story or not.

View All Lessons Register for the Certificate