Course Details

This class is focused on how to tell stories with data to create social impact. We will learn through research, professional examples and hands-on work with tools and technologies. We will introduce basic methods for research, cleaning and analyzing datasets, but the focus is on creative methods and media for data presentation and storytelling. We will consider the emotional, aesthetic and practical effects of different presentation methods. Over the course of the semester, students will work in small groups to create three sketches, each using a different technique for telling a data-driven story.

Outcomes: Students will learn techniques for finding a story in data, building a basic set of tool-assisted data analysis skills; Students will practice arts- and rhetoric-based approaches to telling data-driven stories; Design and produce data-driven digital stories that combine technical visualization skills with narrative strategies to engage communities and communicate complex social realities clearly and responsibly; Students will learn the vocabulary and concepts needed to find and understand open and public data sources; Students will learn basic ethnographic and anthropological approaches to identifying and researching audiences.