Organised by The Guardian
An interactive weekend bootcamp of lectures, seminars and exercises, that will equip you with the tools for telling stories with data
If you want your story to create an impact that hits fast but lasts a long time, you might have considered using beautiful visuals using data. Yet how can you ensure you are selecting the right data that conveys your message without overloading your intended audience? How can you build on the basics of using data, to dig deeper into your story, identify your audience, and speak to them directly?
This year, we’re launching a brand new weekend conference, that will bring together the best talent in data visualisation, to allow you to build on your beginner or intermediate understanding of information design, to create presentations that pack a punch, or communicate an essential message with verve and vivacity.
Blending lectures, seminars, activities and between-session homework that will enable you to apply your learnings to your own datasets, this weekend bootcamp will see the impact of your storytelling rise a head above the rest.
Course content
- What is information design?: Isabel Meirelles from OCAD University takes you through the fundamentals of good visual design, and the ways in which cognitive science, human-computer interactions, colour, visual language, cartography and typography affect the ways that we interpret and are influenced by visual messages.
- Data exploration and story finding: Adam Frost and Tobias Sturt, data visualisation experts from the Guardian, lead a practical workshop that explores how you can source, clean, analyse and verify your data, and the techniques for finding a compelling story.
- What is user-centred design?: Emma Cosh, information designer, takes you through the latest design frameworks and methodologies that put the user at the heart of the story you are visualising, to demonstrate how to create stories that have the power to persuade multiple audiences.
- Design and wireframing: In the second workshop of the weekend with Adam Frost and Tobias Sturt, you will apply design principles to develop a static infographic that transforms your data into a visual story, touching on the use of copy to introduce and contextualise your chart.
- The radical potential of data ethics: Lauren Klein, co-author of Data Feminism, will examine the unequal power structures in the realm of data and offer a new way of thinking to challenge these inequalities.
- Expand your creative toolbox for telling data stories: Rahul Bhargava will take you through some of the best work produced by data visualisation practitioners today, covering why they work, what lessons we can learn from them, and how to use these findings to expand your ambition around what you can achieve.
- Draw yourself with Data Visualisation: To close the weekend, Sabhyata Jain will lead this hands-on workshop.
This course is for…
Anyone interested in learning more about the potential of storytelling with data
Anyone who needs to communicate information in their professional role and is looking for more effective and compelling approaches
Tutor Profiles
Adam Frost was formerly head of data visualisation at the Guardian’s digital agency. He is now content director at Add Two, an agency specialising in data visualisation. His work has appeared on the Guardian, the New Statesman, Buzzfeed and elsewhere. Adam has also produced infographics and interactives for a range of public and private sector clients including the Department for Education, Google and Unilever.
Tobias Sturt was head of creative at the Guardian’s digital agency and is now creative director of Add Two. He has been working in digital storytelling for almost two decades using all kinds of media – from web to TV, games and infographics.
Emma Cosh is a freelance analytics and data visualisation consultant living in the UK. Their work has been featured in The Guardian, and Tor.Com, and been long listed for The Information is Beautiful Awards.
Isabel Meirelles is a designer and educator whose intellectual curiosity lies in the relationships between visual thinking and visual representation. She is a Professor in the Faculty of Design at OCAD University in Toronto, Canada. Isabel’s research focuses on the theoretical and experimental examination of the fundamentals underlying how information is structured, represented, and communicated in different media. Meirelles is the author of “Design for Information: An introduction to the histories, theories, and best practices behind effective information visualizations” (Rockport Publishers, 2013).
Rahul Bhargava is an educator, researcher, designer, and facilitator who works on data storytelling and technology design in support of social justice and community empowerment. His workshops have been bringing people together around data with engaging activities since 2010. Rahul is co-creator of the Data Culture Project, which helps individuals and organizations build their data capacity in creative ways. He combines a background in interactive robotics, education, and effective data presentation to build creative and playful activities that introduce data literacy in appropriate ways to a variety of audiences. Rahul argues that our toolbox for telling data stories is far too small, and engages the approaches and materials of the arts in support of building a wider set of projects and practices. He is currently an Assistant Professor of Journalism and Art + Design at Northeastern University, where he founded and leads the Data Culture Group. This academic research group builds collaborative projects to interrogate our datafied society, with a focus on rethinking participation and power in data process.
Sabhyata Jain is a designer and storyteller based out of Delhi, India. By day she is a product designer at Microsoft, using design as a medium to bring technology to life. By night, she tells stories with data, people & experiences.
Lauren Klein is an associate professor in the departments of English and Quantitative Theory & Methods at Emory University, where she also directs the Digital Humanities Lab. Before moving to Emory, she taught in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at Georgia Tech. Klein works at the intersection of digital humanities, data science, and early American literature, with a research focus on issues of gender and race. She has designed platforms for exploring the contents of historical newspapers, modeled the invisible labor of women abolitionists, and recreated forgotten visualization schemes with fabric and addressable LEDs. In 2017, she was named one of the “rising stars in digital humanities” by Inside Higher Ed. She is the author of An Archive of Taste: Race and Eating in the Early United States (University of Minnesota Press, 2020) and, with Catherine D’Ignazio, Data Feminism (MIT Press, 2020). With Matthew K. Gold, she edits Debates in the Digital Humanities, a hybrid print-digital publication stream that explores debates in the field as they emerge. Her current project, Data by Design: An Interactive History of Data Visualization, 1786-1900, was recently funded by an NEH-Mellon Fellowship for Digital Publication.
Course Details
Dates: Saturday 19 and Sunday 20 June 2021
Times: 2pm - 5.15pm (BST) on Saturday, 2pm - 6.15pm (BST) on Sunday
2pm BST | 3pm CEST | 6am PDT | 9am EDT