Telling a Story, with Data

The five-day, intensive Storytelling with Data Workshop has three sessions running the weeks of June 8, June 15, and June 22.

Data has become an inescapable fact of life in the 21st century. The digitization of reams of personal and professional information has made data literacy critical to workplace survival. Global consulting firm McKinsey & Company has predicted that by 2018, there will be 490,000 data analysis jobs in the United States, but a shortage of people trained in the field of data storytelling.

For those interested in honing their skills, BU’s College of Communication, College of Arts & Sciences’ department of computer science, and the Rafik B. Hariri Institute for Computing and Computational Science & Engineering are hosting the second annual Storytelling with Data Workshop, which will be offered over three separate weeklong sessions throughout the month of June. The goal of the workshop is to equip communication professionals, educators, and students across a wide variety of fields with the skills required to find, wrangle, and weed through large datasets to tell memorable, impactful stories.

“Data storytelling is the ability to excavate the most compelling information from large datasets and present them to an audience in the most compelling way, so that the message within the story resonates and moves the needle somehow for them,” says workshop organizer Maggie Mulvihill, a COM clinical professor of journalism, former media attorney, and award-winning investigative journalist who cofounded the BU-based New England Center for Investigative Reporting (NECIR). “That could be persuading them to read a news story, open their wallets to make a donation, vote one way or the other on an important issue or decision, hire a new professional or business, or be convinced to decide a certain way in a legal proceeding.”

In its 2011 series titled “Our Youngest Killers,” the NECIR published a story about the crackdown on Massachusetts’ youngest killers. Its reporters built the first-ever statewide database of those under the age of 16 who had been charged with first-degree murder. Their review found no pattern to explain why some killers got life without parole and others won lesser sentences.

The series was named a finalist for the 2011 Livingston Award for Young Journalists, and was credited with showing “how a crackdown on ‘super predators’ in Massachusetts developed into a profoundly inequitable system of justice for adolescents.” That story would not have been possible if it weren’t for writers who knew how and where to look to find data that could educate and inform readers.

The workshops, which already have more than 50 attendees registered (an almost 40 percent increase from last year), will teach seven core skills: identifying data, obtaining data, extracting data, cleaning data, analyzing data, visualizing data and, finally, how to tell a story with the data. Attendees will learn things like how to extract data from social media, how to create and manipulate a spreadsheet, getting started with structured query language, and creating interactive maps and infographics.

Last year, Mulvihill says, many attendees said the storytelling portion of the workshop was their favorite because it taught them how to humanize data and structure a story. This year, those leading sessions about the building blocks of the story will include journalists like Mitch Zuckoff, the Sumner M. Redstone Professor in Narrative Studies and the best-selling author of several books, including 13 Hours: The Inside Account of What Really Happened Inside Benghazi; Brooke Williams, a New York Times contributor and Harvard University fellow; Michelle Johnson, a COM assistant professor of the practice in multimedia journalism; and Rochelle Sharpe, a Pulitzer Prize–winning data journalist and a COM adjunct professor of journalism.

Among the other speakers taking part in the workshop are Mark Crovella, a professor and chairman of computer science at CAS; Matt Carroll, a research scientist with the MIT Media Lab’s Future of News Initiative; Aaron Kessler, a data journalist and New York Times reporter; and Catherine Cloutier, data producer for the Boston Globe.

“As journalists, we are trained to find the news, the angle—it’s second nature,” Mulvihill says. “We are trying to teach what comes naturally to us, which is using data to tell stories, and to help other professions do that as well.”

The workshop is part of the University’s newly formed Storytelling with Data Initiative, says Mulvihill. Its mission includes training BU students and faculty on cutting-edge data mining, visualization, and storytelling techniques; distributing data-driven reports and stories produced by BU faculty and staff; hosting conferences; and running the new online open government tool for local and municipal data called Town Square New England, which is currently in development at COM. This project has received seed funding from BU’s Center for Finance, Law, & Policy.

“For those entering the communication fields today, the ability to extract meaningful, fact-based stories from so-called Big Data will be as necessary as typing was to the pre-digital generation,” says COM Dean Tom Fiedler (COM’71). “This workshop is designed to teach those of us who aren’t math wizards how to dig into these massive data troves for the information we communicators need to tell stories to our audiences.”

This year’s workshop includes several new features including two learning tracks, one for beginners and one for more experienced data analysts; additional interactive sessions that include how to mine streaming data; free demonstrations showcasing the latest data storytelling technology; and more interactive data demonstrations.

The Storytelling with Data Workshop has three sessions: June 8–12, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.; June 15–19, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.; and June 22–26, 5:30 p.m. to 9 p.m., and June 27, 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. All sessions will be held at the College of Communication, 640 Commonwealth Ave. The event is $1,350 for professionals and $650 for students, and registration is required. Register here.