For today’s short story visualisation, I decided to focus on the news that the Coronavirus isolation period was set to increase from 7 to 10 days. The simplest way to show this would be to use a bar chart with two bars - a before bar showing 7 and an after bar showing 10. I love a simple visualisation but I wanted to find something equally simple but a bit more pleasurable to look at. 

My initial idea was to do something with a circle, analogous to a clock given we’re talking about time. I spent around 30 minutes mulling over different ideas in my head and searching for inspiration online. I had an idea but I wasn’t particularly impressed with it. So rather than spend more time thinking, or settle for something I wasn’t happy with, instead I decided to walk away.

Walking away from a problem isn’t always the best advice, but I find when struggling for inspiration when creating a data visualisation, or presentation, going to do something else and letting your subconscious brain churn away at it instead can work wonders and it means that when you’re ready to return to it, invariably new ideas will crop up.

How long should you walk away? I think it depends. Sometimes just 15 minutes will do, other times it might be a whole day or week. Today, for me, it was 15 minutes. I put my laptop down and went to talk to my family about other things. And when I then returned to my laptop, I suddenly had the realisation that for this visualisation I wasn’t talking about time as in hours (which the clock analogy works for), I instead was talking about days, and therefore I needed a calendar analogy. I pictured someone in isolation looking at their calendar and counting down the days until they could go out again. And that’s how I ended up with today’s visualisation.

It's still a simple visualisation, but an effective one to demonstrate the truth and growth in my data story.

For more of my growing collection of short stories, click here.

Data Visualisation and Data Storytelling are all about following key principles and then practice, practice, practice. In a previous post I talked about Makeover Mondays, an initiative to get you into the habit of critiquing and then refreshing a past visualisation.

Another way in which I am now looking to continue to test myself in my own data storytelling and data visualisation practice, is to introduce Short Stories. These will be a quick and concise data visualisations, shared in a standard form that presents a story from the news in that day. By adding the constraint of a set format and bold style, I hope to test my own imagination on how to tell simple but effective stories. Here are my first two from this week:

For my first #MondayMakeover, I initially struggled to find the story. Here was a dataset about three different species of penguins, comparing the relationship between Flipper Length and Bill Length. 

It was clear that there is a relationship between the two measurements, but the correlation wasn't interesting to me....I had to find a different angle.

A quick bit of googling and I found the story. Adelie penguins are native (and have been for a long time) to the Palmer Peninsular in Antarctica. The Chinstrap and Gentoo Penguins however are newcomers to the region. Furthermore, the Adelie penguins are on a sharp decline. In any society where two species contest the same food source, trouble is going to take place. Therefore the introduction of the different species and consequences based on their relative size looked to be the story for me.

Therefore for my visualisation I took the following design decisions:

1. Share the backstory in fairly detailed prose to educate the reader.
2. Choose a colour scheme that matched to images I found from the region.
3. Simplify the data by only showing the average sizes of the three species - I like showing individual data points but they are not needed to support my story.
4. I chose to select a blue colour for my Adelie penguin bars (no pun intended!) that matched the colour I used for my Antarctica image to demonstrate they were native to the area.

Here's my final image. Let me know what you think and does it make for a more interesting and insightful visualisation than the original?

To improve at Data Visualisation, its important we do two things:
1. We Find Inspiration from Others;
​2. We Practice and Seek Feedback.
(It's also important that we critique but I will leave that for another post).

There is so much good work and innovation at the moment in the field of data visualisation and one group that look to support that are the good folks at #MakeoverMonday.

The team at Makeover Monday publish a new dataset and visualisation each Sunday and then invite people from the data visualisation community (you and me) to take a go at redesigning the visualisation to tell your own story and give your own perspective. By sharing your visualisation on a platform like Twitter, it then gives others the opportunity to comment and feedback to help you hone your visualisation.

Data science roles and the importance it plays in modern businesses continues to grow. It also continues to get more technical.
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There’s a lot of training courses and support networks out there to support the technical side of growth, but less support out there for the softer side of things around communication, influencing and stakeholder relationships.

As data becomes bigger and more complex, it needs to be balanced by approaches that make it more accessible and understandable. This is will allow it to achieve its full value.

At Finding Stories our aim is to help individuals and teams find that balance. Our goal is to help bright and technically minded individuals and teams become more rounded and accessible, and in doing so, have more influence and help support career growth.

We’re starting out by supporting on key skills around Data Visualisation and Data Storytelling but over time will grow into areas such as influencing, facilitation and leadership - all key skills that are needed to drive change and grow careers.

Our training courses are designed to be accessible, interesting and relevant, with the learnings easy to apply in your day to day role.

Our courses are designed for individuals and teams at the start of their data journey, or for individuals ready to push on and elevate themselves above the crowd.

We’re here to help you find your story and help you learn, develop and grow as a result.

Click here to find out more about our growing training offering.