R1 Storytelling with Data – Irene Alvarado

Notes on our readings for week 01/21

Storytelling -the art of telling stories- has been around, as some of the authors point out, forever. But that doesn’t mean that stories have been present everywhere and at all times. In fact, not anyone would have called themselves a storyteller perhaps even 40 years ago. Of course all that’s changed in this day and age, where most people with a Twitter account now have the right to call themselves “storytellers” or at least “micro story tellers”. I would partially disagree and partially agree with some of the authors, especially Malcolm Slaney. I agree with his comment that:

Just a collection of data from moments is only as much a story as putting together all the photos from the year in random order is the story of that year… selecting appropriate data from relevant moments is a more difficult problem.

I’d like to push that thought further and consider for a moment a more extreme viewpoint: what if nothing really qualifies as a micro story unless it ties into a bona fide, well crafted mega story with some kind of story arc (at least a plot twist or climax)? Why should a series of tweets, even if they follow some chronological progression and say something significant about a moment to the person who tweeted it and to his followers be considered a story? On the other hand why would it not count? If we take a story to be the account of some event with real or imaginary people told for entertainment, then a twitter story or some aggregation of tweets with context would count.

On the other hand, what if each of us thought of a particular fiction book or movie that somehow changed our lives? Would it be a difficult task? Would you be able to come up with 1, 10, 20 different options? Now could you do the same but with data art? Or new media “mega stories”? Maybe some of us could, but I’d imagine the majority of the population could not. Does this mean that we’re dealing with entirely new mediums that we’ve yet to learn how to use to their utmost expressive power? Perhaps. Aaron Koblin for one is a big believer in virtual reality for storytelling purposes. In his words:

Empathy is a huge unexpected side effect of VR. When you have presence – the feeling of being in another place – you have a sense of vulnerability, and when this sense of vulnerability is combined with another person (real or not real) you get a sense of connection. That connection is a powerful thing.

The problem is that storytelling is everywhere. Neuroscientists are saying that the concept of identity is strongly tied to the stories we tell ourselves about our past, marketers use it to champion their products, brands use it to build customer engagement, and designers, especially, have started branding themselves as storytellers.

Marc Schmidt comments on how data has a cost, in that having so much of it buries the real information behind sheer data volume (thus leading to information anxiety). In the same way, I fear that the presence of “stories everywhere” told by “everyone” will bury or distort our sense of what a genuinely good story can be. If anything, with all of these new technologies at the tip of our hands, our bar should be higher, extremely high. So that if you have shiny new tools you’re expected to tell that much better of a story. Or at least as good as a decent fiction book.