Data Storytelling and Visualization

We swim in a world of data – from election results, budgets, and census reports, to Facebook updates and image uploads. Journalists and other communicators need to know how to find stories in data and shape them in compelling ways. It’s good storytelling and it’s good business as startup news organizations, legacy media and other brands are actively hiring data storytellers.

This 5-week course will teach you how to gather and analyze data to find stories and to visualize them as interactive narratives. This fast-growing discipline is at the crossroads of storytelling, statistical analysis and interactive design.

For journalists, technologists and others interested in refining their data skills.

Session 1:
Finding, cleaning and analyzing data

We look at datasets online; we clean them; we learn how to analyze them with sound statistical methods. We learn the ins and outs of Excel spreadsheets.

Session 2:
Visualizing data

We use the latest plug-and-play Web tools to produce multimedia timelines, maps that highlight locations while telling a story, and photos and graphics with layers of added context.

Session 3:
Scraping without code

Sometimes you need to create your own dataset. We use Outwit Hub to extract information from websites without code.

Session 4:
Building an interactive data project

How do we make data engaging? We get our hands dirty and bring to life a sample dataset.

Session 5:
Digging through unstructured data

We explore advanced techniques to find patterns in unstructured data.

Follow-up session (optional)
Join us a month after the workshop for a one-hour virtual follow-up session.