Digital Transformation

Assignment 2

Transformation with art and technology of great

data storytelling

Submitted by
Syndicate 12- MB4:

Nilesh Raghuvanshi 18020541093

Richa Jain 18020541115
Sameeksha Sharma 18020541130
Sanya Wadhwa 18020541132
Shankar Bhide 18020541135
Shankha Banerjee 18020541136
Debrup Sarkar 18020541169
 Data Storytelling
The most effective way to share business information and drive outcomes. The rate that
businesses collect data today is phenomenal. You can now collect data on every aspect of your
business and, in fact, your life.

Despite the surgence of solutions, such as BI tools, dashboards, and spreadsheets over the recent
decades, businesses still are unable to fully take advantage of the opportunities hidden in their
data.

Dashboards and spreadsheets only tell you what is happening. But, they do not tell you why!

BI tools, dashboards and spreadsheets have a number of limitations:

 Data wrangling and manual reporting is still prevalent. The need for human intervention
slows data analytics and communications within organizations.
 These tools only present data as numbers and charts. They lack the vital component of
narrative for effectively communicating information and insights.
 Current tools make scaling information requests impossible. Most marketing, sales,
operations and analytics teams lack the resources and time to respond to all requests for
reporting from every level of a company, including external stakeholders such as
customers.

Put simply, data in dashboards and spreadsheets only tell what is happening. But, they do not tell
you why.

So how can enterprises transform their data centre into a profit centre, where all stakeholders
benefit from having access to relevant data, shared in a language and format that suits them?

The answer is simple: adopt a data storytelling culture in your company.

Why is data storytelling the future?

Data storytelling is a methodology for communicating information, tailored to a specific audience,
with a compelling narrative. It is the last ten feet of your data analysis and arguably the most
important aspect.

Evolutionarily, as Humans, we are naturally hard-wired to share stories as a means of sharing

information.
Theorists even suggest that storytelling was the primary launchpad for the transmission of
knowledge across large groups of people, which formed cultures as we know them today and
allowed evolutionary success across generations.

Now, with the so much data available to us, only data storytelling can put a human perspective on
the increasingly complex and rapidly changing world of the digital era.

Data storytelling merges three key fields of expertise:

Data science: This field of expertise is the interdisciplinary field of sciences, which extracts
knowledge and insight from data, making it readily available. This exciting field has made
significant changes to our daily lives in the past couple of decades.

The technologies we take for granted are all driven by this field of expertise, but there is one thing
that data scientists are not naturally skilled in:

Storytelling:

Data scientists are often skilled at, collecting and delivering data, but lack the skills to relay a true
understanding of the opportunities hidden in the data delivered.

Visualizations:
The emergence of technology solutions such as dashboards became a natural solution in aiding us
to comprehend our vast amounts of data collected. Transforming data into graphs, pie, and line
charts meant we could see our data like never before, however, alone data visualizations have
limitations. They provided at-a-glance snapshots of data, lacking the context needed to explain
why something has happened.

Narrative:

The third and, somewhat, most vital part of a data story is the narrative. Narrative uses language in
a format that suits our particular needs, augmenting our full comprehension of new information. A
narrative is a key vehicle to convey insights, with visualizations and data being important proof
points.

What makes up a good data story?

A good data story leverages three major components:

Data, narrative, and visuals.

The data component is simple, we must have the accurate data, to reach correct insights. The
visual component enables us to spot trends and patterns in datasets, which are not easily seen in
the rows and columns of spreadsheets.

The narrative components which concern the simple language used to describe the data can be
seen as giving a voice to the data. Each data point is a character in a story - a protagonist - with its
own story to tell. Combined together, narrative, data, and visuals can create data stories which
drive change in businesses.

Data Storytelling is not a new concept. Companies have been attempting it for many years now
and have seen the success.

Why is Data Storytelling the Essential Data Science Skill Everyone Needs?

Once your business has started collecting and combining all kinds of data, the next elusive step
is to extract value from it. Your data may hold tremendous amounts of potential value, but not
an ounce of value can be created unless insights are uncovered and translated into actions or
business outcomes. During a 2009 interview, Google’s Chief Economist Dr. Hal R.Varian stated,
"The ability to take data—to be able to understand it, to process it, to extract value from it, to
visualize it, to communicate it—that’s going to be a hugely important skill in the next decades."
Fast forward to 2016 and many businesses would agree with Varian’s astute assessment.

As data becomes increasingly ubiquitous, companies are desperately searching for talent with
these data skills. LinkedIn recently reported data analysis is one of the hottest skill categories
over the past two years for recruiters, and it was the only category that consistently ranked in
the top 4 across all of the countries they analyzed. Interestingly, much of the current hiring
emphasis has centered on the data preparation and analysis skills—not the "last mile" skills that
help convert insights into actions. Many of the heavily-recruited individuals with advanced
degrees in economics, mathematics, or statistics struggle with communicating their insights to
others effectively—essentially, telling the story of their numbers.

The need for more data storytellers is only going to increase in the future. With the shift
towards more self-service capabilities in analytics and business intelligence, the pool of people
generating insights will expand beyond just analysts and data scientists. This new breed of data
tools will make it easier for people across business functions to access and explore the data on
their own. As a result, we’re going to see an unprecedented number of insights being generated
within companies than ever before. However, unless we can improve the communication of
these insights we will also see a poorer insight-to-value conversion rate. If an insight isn’t
understood and isn’t compelling, no one will act on it and no change will occur.

Data visualization expert Stephen Few said, “Numbers have an important story to tell. They rely
on you to give them a clear and convincing voice.” Any insight worth sharing is probably best
shared as a data story. The phrase “data storytelling” has been associated with many things—
data visualizations, infographics, dashboards, data presentations, and so on. Too often data
storytelling is interpreted as just visualizing data effectively, however, it is much more than just
creating visually-appealing data charts. Data storytelling is a structured approach for
communicating data insights, and it involves a combination of three key elements: data, visuals,
and narrative.

It’s important to understand how these different elements combine and work together in data
storytelling. When narrative is coupled with data, it helps to explain to your audience what’s
happening in the data and why a particular insight is important. Ample context and
commentary are often needed to fully appreciate an insight. When visuals are applied to data,
they can enlighten the audience to insights that they wouldn’t see without charts or graphs.
Many interesting patterns and outliers in the data would remain hidden in the rows and
columns of data tables without the help of data visualizations.

Finally, when narrative and visuals are merged together, they can engage or even entertain an
audience. It’s no surprise we collectively spend billions of dollars each year at the movies to
immerse ourselves in different lives, worlds, and adventures. When you combine the right
visuals and narrative with the right data, you have a data story that can influence and drive
change.
 Why data storytelling is essential?

For thousands of years, storytelling has been an integral part of our humanity. Even in our
digital age, stories continue to appeal to us just as much as they did to our ancient ancestors.
Stories play a vibrant role in our daily lives—from the entertainment we consume to the
experiences we share with others to what we conjure up in our dreams.

Modern-day storytelling is often associated with the popular TED conference series and its
slogan of “Ideas Worth Spreading.” Analysis of the most popular 500 TED Talk presentations
found that stories made up at least 65% of their content. Throughout time, storytelling has
proven to be a powerful delivery mechanism for sharing insights and ideas in a way that is
memorable, persuasive, and engaging.

For some people, crafting a story around the data may seem like an unnecessary, time-
consuming effort. They may feel the insights or facts should be sufficient to stand on their own
as long as they’re reported in a clear manner. They may believe the revealed insights alone
should influence the right decisions and drive their audience to act. Unfortunately, this point of
view is based on the flawed assumption that business decisions are based solely on logic and
reason.

In fact, neuroscientists have confirmed decisions are often based on emotion, not logic. USC
professor Antonio Damasio found patients, who had brain damage in an area that helped to
process emotions (prefrontal cortex), struggled to make basic decisions when choosing
between alternatives. Deciding on where to eat or when to schedule an appointment turned
into lengthy cost-benefit debates for these individuals. Interestingly, these patients’ decision-
making skills were significantly impaired by the lack of emotional judgment. Emotion actually
plays an essential role in helping our brains to navigate the alternatives and arrive at a timely
decision.

When you package up your insights as a data story, you build a bridge for your data to the
influential, emotional side of the brain. When neuroscientists observed the effects detailed
information had on an audience, brain scans revealed it only activated two areas of the brain
associated with language processing: Broca’s area and Wernicke’s area. However, when
someone is absorbed in a story, they discovered it stimulated more areas of the brain. People
hear statistics, but they feel stories. This subtle but important difference pays dividends for
data storytellers in a few key ways:

 Memorability: A study by Stanford professor Chip Heath (Made to Stick author)

found 63% could remember stories, but only 5% could remember a single
statistic. While 2.5 statistics were used on average in the exercise and only 10%
of the participants incorporated a story, the stories are what caught people’s
attention.
  Persuasiveness: In another study, researchers tested two variations of a
brochure for the Save the Children charity organization. The story-based version
outperformed the infographic version by $2.38 to $1.14 in terms of per
participant donations. Various statistics on the plight of African children were far
less persuasive than the story of Rokia, a seven-year-old from Mali, Africa.

 Engagement: Researchers also discovered people enter into a trance-like state,

where they drop their intellectual guard and are less critical and skeptical. Rather
than nitpicking over the details, the audience wants to see where the story leads
them. As mathematician John Allen Paulos observed, “In listening to stories we
tend to suspend disbelief in order to be entertained, whereas in evaluating
statistics we generally have an opposite inclination to suspend belief in order not
to be beguiled.”

In a previous article, I shared an account of Ignaz Semmelweis, a mid-nineteenth century

obstetrician, who discovered hand washing could save countless lives but failed to
communicate his findings effectively to a skeptical medical community. His data was ignored,
his life-saving ideas were rejected, and he was sadly discredited by his colleagues.

Many bold, incredible insights will suffer a similar fate if they are not successfully molded into
data stories. Uncovering key insights is one skill and communicating them is another—both are
equally critical to deriving value from the data your business is now amassing. Data storytelling
represents an exciting, new field of expertise where art and science truly converge. My hope is
more data storytellers—from across an organization—will emerge to ensure the survival and
adoption of more transformative insights.

Why is data storytelling powerful?

Facts simply present data; whereas, a story’s narrative provides context, which augments our
understanding and drives valuable insights.

Modern storytelling can be found in our cinemas, our televisions, our newspapers, the internet;
any medium we consume has the potential to tell a story.

Even in the space of education, leaders in this sector are now utilizing the power of storytelling.
For example, an analysis of popular educational and informative videos series, TED Talks, found
that stories make up at least 65% of the content. Why? Because stories have always been an easier
form for the transmission of meaningful information.

As humans, we are by nature, social creatures and we have evolved distinctively compared to
other species as a function of our increasingly social world. Stories have the power to help us
understand meaningful information and, as a consequence, can shape our values, determine our
prejudices, and influence our dreams. Religious texts are the epitome of this; vertically through
generations and horizontally among co-habitants, the most powerful stories written in such texts
are still impacting the modern world to this day.

The psychology of stories, particularly in aid of memory, is a topic of extreme importance in our
new age of information overload. By definition, facts simply present data; whereas, a story’s
narrative provides context, which augments our understanding and drives valuable insights.

Using stories to remember - known as the Story Method - is a simple technique used by memory
champions. The method’s effectiveness is rooted in the use of narratives ability to aid the memory
process, via the emotional aspect of a story which can engage more parts of the brain, making the
story, and its elements, easier to recall.
 Case in Point: Uber
Engineering Intelligence Through Data Visualization at Uber

In early 2015 an official data visualization team was started at Uber. The idea behind it: deliver
intelligence through crafting visual exploratory data analysis tools for Uber’s datasets. Every
day, Uber manages billions of GPS locations. Every minute, our platform handles millions of
mobile events. Every time they don’t use technology to analyze and interpret this information is
an opportunity missed to better understand the business.

Since its inception, the data visualization team in Uber Engineering has grown from one
engineer to a fully stacked team of 15. The skills of data visualization specialists span from
computer graphics to information design, covering creative technology and web platform
development as well. The team focuses on areas from visual analytics to mapping, and
framework development to public-facing data visualizations.

Visual analytics mostly consists of abstract data visualizations. This refers to visualization work
where the data has no inherent spatial structure. Opposed to this notion is scientific
visualization, where visualization depicts data coming from the physical world (maps, 3D
physical structures, etc.) Most visual analytics work in this case relates to reporting, dash
boarding, and real-time analytics in charts and networks. The team powers the visualization
layers on most business insight applications and business data exploration. Other areas
powered by our visualization work include our A/B testing platform and our internal, large-scale
machine learning platform.
The team enforces building reusable components as they create these applications. They
recently open sourced react-vis, a React and D3-powered visualization library that provides
a JSX-based, domain-specific language to compose charts from visual axes, chart types, and
other basic visual elements. It empowers developers to declaratively shape the visualization
they’d like to use with their dataset in a React- and JSX-friendly way.
They are also working on similar efforts for mapping.

Mapping: Rich Exploratory Data

Map-based information is one of the biggest and richest assets at Uber. The billions of GPS
points handled by our platform every day in real-time pose atypical challenges for real-time
mapping visualizations and in-browser, data-dense visualizations.
They develop multiple mapping applications tailored to different customers. One type of
customer is the general managers and City Ops teams in the 400+ cities where Uber operates.
These folks need to have in-the-moment information of the current supply and demand
distribution. They might also need access to aggregated data to better understand the city’s
market for a marketing campaign. Another customer is data science, which needs rich
exploratory interfaces for multidimensional data (broken down by product, time, and geo). We
build applications for them to slice and dice that information and get insights from our data.
The tech stack for these applications consists on a few libraries that we developed and open
sourced. react-map-gl provides a React-friendly layer on top of MapboxGL, a library from
Mapbox that we use extensively at Uber. deck.gl provides an interface for creating WebGL-
powered layers that can be put on top of a map or used standalone for creating abstract data
visualizations.
But all this technology can be used in creative ways as well. A strong part of data visualization is
visual storytelling and data art and illustration.

Public Facing: Data Storytelling

There are many creative ways to tell the story of Uber with data visualization. They can create
visual narratives around topics like safety, efficiency, traffic, or Uber’s role in the public-transit
network.

they recently created a data visualization that explores how uberPOOL can have an impact in
making cities’ transportation much more efficient. Behind Travis Kalanick in his TED Talk, you’ll
see the data visualization we crafted to show traffic per street segment with and without
uberPOOL, demonstrating POOL’s ability to make cities smarter by reducing traffic.

They continue working on other visual narratives. This area of work has an interesting mix of
data journalism paired with data art and illustration that creates challenges. Data handling is as
challenging as the work we do for our internal visual exploratory data analysis products, but
aesthetics plays an important role—the visual stimulation and human digestibility is often a
bigger priority than effective information design techniques.
For example, they started collaborating with the design team to get branded videos for
animated maps showing every car on trip with Uber for a full day, a day in the life of Uber. The
result is a WebGL application that runs server-side rendering for each frame and compiles it
into a video. The application takes care of everything from the data gathering process (through
Hive) to constructing the video with offline rendering techniques.
Uber has used data storytelling to communicate annually with its customers.

In place of an annual recap email showing the total amount of money you have spent with Uber,
they have shifted the conversation to show how much value the service has delivered to their
riders. Showcasing personalised statistics of your experience with the app, you immediately can
see how much impact they’ve made to your everyday life.

We wanted to remind people of the role Uber plays in [users] lives and demonstrate how the use
of the ridesharing service is a partnership that enables them to move across cities, every day -
Uber’s Eshan Ponnaduran

Innovation in data storytelling

As we saw above, enterprises have been using data storytelling for years now. However, it is still
mostly manual processes that we rely on heavily to pull the data, develop the appropriate
visualisations, draft the narrative, and gather insights.

Imagine a world where the next generation of technology solves this challenge: a data storytelling
AI led platform that enables your organisation to scale and personalise stories automatically. For
example, ad operations and sales teams of major publishers could aggregate and clean their data
instantly, with automated reports built and sent to their intended audience, their advertisers.

Marketing teams operating dozens of brands across multiple regions could instantly access their
data in real-time. You could empower every team member in your organisation to become a data
storyteller with automated, AI technology.

The future is, of course, data storytelling, but automated solutions already exist in the market.

Conclusion
The combination of data, visuals, and narrative - data storytelling - will allow businesses to
discover more valuable insights than ever before. For too long the focus has been on uncovering
key insights, communicating them is equally important.

Only data storytelling can put a human perspective on the increasingly complex and rapidly
changing world of the digital era.

References

https://www.forbes.com/sites/brentdykes/2016/03/31/data-storytelling-the-essential-data-science-
skill-everyone-needs/#6702f7d452ad

https://eng.uber.com/data-viz-intel/