A newsletter to learn about practical ways to decolonize your research and data work-lives with byte-sized drabbles about the daily life of a data professional.

People Remember Good Stories

Data work is inherently storytelling work. We tell a story when we talk about what we did, what we see, or what method we used for data science. This is true whether we are talking about how we assign tags to a record, notice a database indexing issue, or have a bug in code.

I’ve noticed that a lot of data jobs don’t consider themselves storytellers or writers or literary critics. And that bothered me.

This has been on my mind the past few weeks. I made another indie game for the biggest itchio community for visual novel. I’ve been playing other participant’s games for the last twelve days and seeing what narrative they came up with.

Back in 2016 I started working with metadata - literally meaning data about data - and experimenting with my career using machine learning on Chinese linguistics data. At the time I didn’t realize how foundational that moment in my life would be. The whole year I met with study participants and had to give an elevator speech on the data I was working with and why it mattered. That was storytelling!

We use stories that we create to share messages. In my work I like using metaphors. Most of my clients or colleagues have no idea how to make a video game or how to use the command line to program fixes to databases. I’ll often compare the data issue at hand with another aspect of life.

For example, I talked about how picking database systems is a lot of like shopping for a car. They all say they’re the best at x, y, z, but remember they’re salesmen. And a car is a car at the end of the day.

The point is data work is storytelling and to tell good stories we need to relate to local cultural knowledge. This is the tricky part. If you watch a lot of TV or pop culture trends or are an artistic person, you’re probably more adept at communicating your data to non-techy people.

Communicating data is about comprehension. You could have the coolest chart or a ground-breaking research study, but the folks in charge won’t care if they can’t understand. So get creative! Think outside the box.

Educational Opportunities

A short list of things to explore!

[Video Podcast] Data Stories in Video Games are Literary Works

This is a podcast episode that deep dives into a 1998 video game Xenogears, a dark RPG that with complex storytelling elements. It’s worth listening to because it does a good job at tying in philosophy, psychology, and storytelling methods to say that if you have messy/loose data, it’s meaningless. It’s our job as data storytellers to share messages with meaning.

[Online Classes] Take an Online Creative Writing Course

Writing about computational methods, data analysis, or metadata issues in a catalog record is still writing. Writing is a skill and creative writing is a social skill. Skill up!

[Thinking Fuel] 8 Tips for Telling Captivating Stories

Life requires us to tell stories - at jobs, with friends, and in prose. Get better at it with these tips.

Let’s Create!

I’m open to collaborations, freelance gigs, and conversations about the ideas I shared. Feel free to get in touch and comment on the newsletter.