Data Storytelling Toolkit

Are you just getting started with data storytelling and need some inspiration? Or are you looking for some tools that might help you take your work to the next level? Take a look at the suggestions below - and let me know if you have anything you'd like to add! This page is ever-evolving, so check back for new items.

Inspiration

• Flowing Data

• Periscopic

• New York Times (especially the Year in Visual Stories 2016, 2015)

• ProPublica (Year in Visual and Interactive Storytelling 2016)

• Hans Rosling's TED talk (this started so many in this field)

Looking for data?

• American Fact Finder (Census Bureau)

• data.world

• data.seattle.gov (also check your local .gov for an open data portal!)

• World Bank

• USAFacts (brand new nonprofit providing access to government finance data)

• Uber Movement (data from 2 billion Uber trips)

• Data is Plural - a weekly newsletter of data sets by Jeremy Singer-Vine (super good stuff)

Vizzes I love

• Oddityviz - a visual deconstruction of David Bowie's Space Oddity by Valentina D'Efilippo (perhaps the best visual/audio deconstruction I've ever seen, bar none)

• Periscopic: U.S. Gun Deaths in 2010 and 2013

• Tampa Bay Times: Why Cops Shoot and Failure Factories

• Ann and Josh Jackson's Urban Forest of NYC

• Beatles Albums by Mike Moore

• Matt Chambers' History of the NFL (this might not look complicated, but those little marks betray SO much data)

• History of Crayola Colors by Steven Wagner (doesn't look like data, does it?)

You oughta know

Some of these are very old, some not so much. But these are charts that got us to where we are today. 

• Charles Joseph Minard's illustration of Napoleon's Russian Campaign of 1812 (showing a combination of distance, number of troops, changes to troop numbers over time)

• Joseph Priestley's New Chart of History and A Chart of Biography (maybe the first representation of events on a timeline?)

• John Snow's 1854 Cholera map (also the subject of the fascinating book The Ghost Map by Steven Johnson)

• William Playfair's big inventions: bar charts, area charts, line charts and pie charts

• Florence Nightingale's Diagram of Causes of Mortality deftly shows the number of army casualties from unsanitary conditions. Her work revolutionized sanitation and public health.

• The Brooks' slave ship cutaway a key storytelling tool in the abolitionist movement's toolkit

Best examples of my work

• 7 Starter Data Story Formats
  I took the work Ben Jones did on story types and built a visualization to demonstrate the different ways to tell data stories. This viz accompanies a webinar (also available on the webinar page, above).

• Forbidden 25 Method 1, Method 2, and Method 3
  These three visualizations are included in the blog post titled Forbidden 25: comparing ratings for the top 25 banned books. These visualizations show different ways to present the ratings data, and different approaches to shaping the data.

• What's a Micronutrient and why should I care?
  This multi-page story examines micronutrient deficiencies, shows several charts on each dashboard explaining the impact of these deficiencies, and then includes a calculator and call to action at the end of the story.

• Bicycle Wrecks in Seattle, hour by hour
  This interactive chart combines a map with latitude and longitude coordinates of 4000+ bicycle accidents, as well as accident details such as road conditions, light conditions, and weather conditions. Plus, there's a pie-clock filter that allows you to look at the accidents by timeslice.

• Todd's Egg Tracker
  With a Google sheets back end, this visualization updates every time I include data on our chickens' laying activity.