Data represent stories about life and death
Each data point can contain a dramatic story, used as a compelling bridge to meta communication. These findings were the result of the session in Boston, where delegations with educational and content production backgrounds, constructed five multidisciplinary teams and put them to work. They brainstormed and came up with an interactive narrative experience that tell stories with data, around data, or about data in an innovative manner.
One of the team members, Amanda Casari, data scientist, points out the mindshift she has been experiencing, when she told the process of working with storytellers at Datalore drew her attention for the first time to the data points that are swept aside as outliers in a routine analysis: “I didn’t think about the stories of what the numbers represent like this before”.
The story their team created was a website that used interactive visualizations and video components to open a dialogue around individual, personal tragedy, and is a beautiful illustration of the power of the intellectual cloud, gathered in the MIT Media Lab. The project was named “Irreversible”, and dealt with data about death penalty and execution data in the US.
Any kind of identity, like a data visualization on the web, a physical installation using hardware and human bodies, or an interactive documentary experience was welcomed. As long as the story was told in an engaging and innovative way, investigating the storytelling qualities inside the data-systems.
The Non-Fiction Cartel, StoryCode Boston, Harvard’s Bok Center, the MIT OpenDocLab, and the MIT Center for Civic Media are joined forces for a weekend long hackathon in Boston and brought together designers, technologists, engineers, data scientists, UX-designers, designers, storytellers, artists, journalists and filmmakers interested in multiplatform, interdisciplinary storytelling exercise.
The Datalore modus operandus was one that reversed the production of statistics and data, which goes from the dramatic personal cases to unification, dots on an info graphic. The teams opened up the most illustrative and compelling sides of the data, giving the recipients the possibility to connect to the story. Ánd data.
The last year’s hackathon should happen again soon. We’d love to report.