by R J Andrews
We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are.
ANAÏS NIN, 1903–1977
It is the storyteller's challenge to convince the listeners what to be curious about. The storyteller cannot tell listeners if the story is meaningful or not. That is up to them.
We have referred to the audience as readers and listeners. But really, we should only be using the singular form: reader or listener. Having an audience of thousands does not mean you are going to address the entire mass as a crowd in a stadium. People experience stories alone, in their heads. But what if you did address a stadium of 30,000 people? The magic of story would still occur in 30,000 individual imaginative minds. Address each listener on a human, one-to-one level.
A text is not an entity closed in upon itself; it is the projection of a new universe, different from the one in which we live. Appropriating a work through reading it is to unfold the implicit horizon of the world which embraces the action, the personages, the events of the story told. The result is that the reader belongs to both the experiential horizon of the work imaginatively, and the horizon of his action concretely. … the reading itself is a way of living in the fictitious universe of the work; in this sense we can already say that stories are told but also lived in the imaginary mode.
PAUL RICOEUR, 1986
Novice storytellers think mechanically. Their currency of thought might be camera station, shot size, and camera angle. Master storytellers determine these details based on the relationship they want to create with the viewer. Instead of camera station, what point of view should we have? Instead of shot size, do we want to feel distant or close to the subject? Instead of camera angle, how should we perceive the subject? In good stories, narrative decisions drive technical execution, not the other way around. You see, the discourse is not the main event. What happens in the listener's head in response to the narrative is most important.
Story activates and creates ideas unknown to the storyteller. E.M. Forster knew his queen's grief would make us feel differently about her relationship with the king. But he could never know that his little line would call forward my own grandparents' loving bond. My grandmother's lonely hardship after my grandfather's death is now somehow better illuminated to me. This feeling is a special product of my imagination. It is a private meaning, uniquely mine.
On myths and mythology: What would we be without the help of what does not exist? Not very much, and our very unoccupied minds would pine away if myths, fables, misunderstandings, abstractions, beliefs and monsters, hypotheses and the so-called problems of metaphysics did not people the darkness and the depths of our nature with abstract creations and images.
PAUL VALÉRY, 1871–1945
A master storyteller engages the listener's imagination to bring stories to life. Their listeners intuit internal connections between story elements. A legendary storyteller goes beyond. Their listeners discover personal knowledge that is meaningful outside the story. These are the stories that cause us to feel more alive.
Stories that make us feel alive are often symbolic. Symbols imply more than is obvious; they cannot be fully explained. They can be interpreted in many ways. Symbols can mean different things to different generations. Paradoxically, the universal symbolic is achieved with precise description. Strong story symbols are rich with specific detail and are often very personal to the creator. In contrast, the generic is impersonal. It has no emotion. The generic affords no opportunity for the individual to connect, empathize, and imagine.
It is precisely the colouring, the atmosphere, the unclassifiable individual details of a story, and above all the general purport that informs with life the undissected bones of the plot, that really count.
J.R.R. TOLKIEN, 1892–1973
Powerful symbols are sometimes called archetypes, a concept I think best to let Carl Jung explain:
The universal is that unique thing which affirms the unique qualities of all things
BEN SHAHN, 1957
[Archetypes] are pieces of life itself—images that are integrally connected to the living individual by the bridge of the emotions. That is why it is impossible to give an arbitrary (or universal) interpretation of any archetype. It must be explained in the manner indicated by the whole life-situation of the particular individual to whom it relates…
Myths, told for their own sake, are not stories that have meanings, but stories that give meanings.
JAMES P. CARSE, 1986
They gain life and meaning only when you try to take into account their numinosity—i.e., their relationship to the living individual. Only then do you begin to understand that their names mean very little, whereas the way they are related to you is all-important.
Special effects are just a tool, a means of telling a story. People have a tendency to confuse them as an end to themselves. A special effect without a story is a pretty boring thing.
GEORGE LUCAS, 1983
Stories are engines of knowledge creation, especially self-knowledge. They help us discover more. Sequence, closure, and meaning help bring story flow alive. And if stories are alive, then the successful stories are the ones that survive. A successful story is the one that keeps getting told. These are the stories that do not just help us thrive, but make us feel alive, too.
CHAPTER
13
FREEZE
Frederick Siebel's poster plunged the 1942 American public into the sea to face a young man gasping for life. The drowning sailor makes eye contact, reaches out (or is he fingering the gossiper?), and spits out water to use what might be his last breath to warn: Do not gossip, you might be leaking military intelligence to enemy spies.
This singular image weaves setting, hero, conflict, and outcome. We know where we are (the aftermath of a sunk ship), who we care about (the archetypal sailor, who represents all servicemen), and gain an insight to how this happened (SOMEONE TALKED!). It only takes a few brushstrokes to convey high-stakes emotions, stoke your adrenal system, and speed your heart rate. We leave the piece with new resolve against careless gossip.
Still images do not move, but they can send our minds on causal journeys. Narrative photographs, paintings, and magazine illustrations engage us intellectually and stir our emotions. The frozen stories this chapter is about threaten to drown us in an entire survey of the visual arts. We will resist this deluge and focus on just a few media that help us better connect data to audiences. Not all data stories are frozen, of course. Many interactives, animated films, and presentations sequence data-driven content over time. Yet, each of these build on still comparisons and can benefit from considering the singular image.
Narrative art is art that tells—or narrates—a story through imagery. The power of a story is in how and what it makes us feel. Images ignite imagination, evoke emotions and capture universal cultural truths and aspiration
LUCAS MUSEUM OF NARRATIVE ART
Illustrators have to tell a lot in one frame … when you see a Rockwell you see something of yourself in there. No matter who you are. No matter where you came from.
GEORGE LUCAS, 2013
Illustrator Norman Rockwell became famous for visual stories that caught characters at just the right moment. In The Shiner (1953), a young student sits outside her principal's office with a black eye, smiling. In Rockwell's Freedom From Fear (1943), parents tuck sleeping children into bed, with violent newspaper headlines in view.
Many Rockwell illustrations appeared on the cover of The Saturday Evening Post, a weekly magazine that contained another kind of effective visual story, the print advertisement. Advertising has always been on the cutting edge of attracting attention, conveying messages, and motivating action. Across the last hundred years, ads have kept pace with communication technology across newspapers, radio, television, and the Internet.
When telling a story with just one image, designers must choose a single point in a narrative to suggest the whole story.
ELLEN LUPTON, 2015
Advertisements blend ae
sthetics with utility. Pleasing and beautiful design encourages reader engagement, acceptance, forgiveness, and satisfaction. However, a merely stimulating ad is not a successful ad. Radical designs delight creators and win awards, but confuse audiences. Instead, the advertisement that influences is the real success. So it is with data storytelling. If our design is too bold, we may confuse. If we get lost in aesthetics, our efforts to covey information may be reduced to mere decoration.
I do not regard advertising as entertainment or an art form, but as a medium for information … when Aeschines spoke, they said, “How well he speaks.” But when Demosthenes spoke, they said, “Let us march against Philip.”
DAVID OGILVY, 1985
The classic print magazine advertisement is the most relevant analog to our craft. Its format consists of a headline, image, and body text. Advertising tycoon David Ogilvy had advice on each ingredient. Whether it is an advertisement, newspaper article, or data story, large portions of audiences will only consume the headline. Headlines work well if they promise a benefit, and even better if they communicate news. Headlines should offer helpful information, be written in familiar and descriptive language, and appeal as specifically to the target audience as possible. In advertising, bad headlines do not mention what the product is or what it will do for you. Horrible ads have no headline at all.
If a scene with clearly expressed gist is combined with an object that is incompatible with that gist, the results will be a cognitive effort to resolve the conflict in some way. The advertiser may thereby capture a few more cognitive cycles.
COLIN WARE, 2008
The best visuals arouse curiosity. The reader who wonders what's going on here? is the reader who will stay to find out. We like looking at ads that depict individuals we can identify with, not crowds. Babies, animals, and sex still appeal. Photographs often perform better than illustrations. As data storytellers, we must consider how to grab the reader who only gives us a glance. This can be accomplished in many ways: include a summary comparison, annotate an exemplary data point, or call out a specific insight. Orienting readers to how the chart works is good, but showing something useful the chart can do is better.
A celebrity's image slapped onto an advertisement might grab the reader's attention, but they will depart the engagement thinking about the celebrity instead of the story you want to convey. Quick, superficial decoration is not the same as design elements that lure you into meaningful engagement. Getting the reader's attention is not the same as informing them. Our challenge is to connect the busy reader to the essence of what the whole piece is about. For an advertisement, the essence has something to do with a story that the reader identifies with or aspires to. For a data story, the essence is usually about improving how the reader perceives some aspect of the world.
A superficial feature is an aspect of a situation that can be modified without touching the core of that situation.
HOFSTADTER AND SANDER, 2013
An imitation may be described as an identity manqué. It is artificial. It is not fortuitous as a true metaphor is.
WALLACE STEVENS, 1951
Grids provide a structure for organizing elements into a properly related and harmonious composition.
Glossy magazine pages arrive from a broad tradition of graphic design that evolved from colonial broadsheets, yellow journalism newspapers, and Belle Époque posters. Since then, posters have been used to promote films, propagandize wars, organize protests, and decorate public spaces. Poster design guidelines help concentrate our attention on composition lessons:
What did these old-fashioned advertising men mean by “hitting you in the eye”? They probably meant that a poster must stand out a mile from the other posters displayed around it in the street. … There is one basic kind of poster that graphic designers often use, because it is so visually compelling. This is the Japanese flag, a red disc on a white background. Why is such a simple design so effective? Because the white background isolates the disc from everything around it, from the other posters, and because the disc itself is a form that the eye finds it hard to escape from. The eye is in fact accustomed to making its escape at the points or corners of things, as the head of an arrow for example. A triangle offers three escape routes; a square offers four. A circle has no corners, and the eye is forced to go round and round in it until it tears itself away with an effort.
BRUNO MUNARI, 1966
FOCUS. A clear focal point directs viewers where to look first and keeps them from wandering off the page. Does the eye naturally land on the introductory element?
DIAGONAL. Diagonal lines break the rectangular grid and help the eye cut across the frame, creating a sequential experience. How does the eye move about the panel?
DEPTH. Overlapping objects create a 2.5-dimensional visual hierarchy without the perception problems that mimicking 3-D volumes introduces. Objects in front are elevated to our attention.
STORY. The content of a single frame can communicate setting (context, where are we?), character (what do we care about?), conflict (what contrast and pattern can we see?), and satisfaction (what new knowledge have we learned?).
Depth is combined with color, line weight, scale, and placement to organize visual elements into a successful composition. For data storytellers, these visual elements include common graphic items, like headlines and captions, and items specific to charts and maps, like an interesting comparison or perceptual cluster of marks. In either case, the human brain can only hold a few elements at once in short-term memory. So, how can we preserve complex visual stories that are comprised of thousands of elements?
The inverted pyramid of information puts the critical information first, and elaborative detail after in descending order of importance. It is attributed to Edwin Stanton, Abraham Lincoln's secretary of war, who needed to make sure critical parts of messages were transmitted over telegraphs that were prone to cut out.
A chunk is a unit of information that can be stored in short-term memory. We first saw the concept of chunking with the grouped color categories on my hometown map. In 1956, psychologist George Miller introduced us to the idea that we can only hold about seven chunks in our head at once. This total has since been further pared down; researchers now think we can hold only three or four chunks at once. One trick to complex storytelling is to package a set of ideas into a chunk. Then we can navigate the chunks and break them into their sub-elements as necessary. Cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker explains:
We can only hold in mind just a few of the letters from an arbitrary sequence like MDPHDRSVPCEOIHOP. But if they belong to well-learned chunks such as abbreviations or words, like the ones that pop-out when we group the letters as MD PHD RSVP CEO IHOP, five chunks, we can remember all sixteen. Our capacity can be multiplied yet again when we package the chunks into still bigger chunks, such as the story “The MD and the PHD RSVP'd to the CEO of IHOP,” which can occupy just one slot, with three or four left over for other stories.
A category pulls together many phenomena in a manner that benefits the creature in whose mind it resides. It allows invisible aspects of objects, actions, and situations to be “seen.”
HOFSTADTER AND SANDER, 2013
Too many visual elements cannot reasonably compete for attention at once. If you overwhelm the reader, then they may disengage. Instead, use gestalt effects, such as enclosure and grouping, to arrange elements into visual chunks. Colin Ware showed how visual search can be enhanced if “smaller objects of search can predictably be associated with larger visual objects.” The use of multiscale design chunks information into visual hierarchies that match conceptual meaning.
Gestalt psychology emerged out of the Berlin School of experimental psychology in the early 1900s. It attempted to understand how, in the words of Kurt Koffka, “the whole is other than the sum of the parts.” Despite some erroneous conclusions, it has inspired a century of psychological inquiry into how we perceive the world.
Visual pop-out occurs when a distinct ite
m stands out from the rest of the field. It is the opposite effect of grouping. Pop-out is a pre-attentive effect, an automatic process that occurs before the act of attention. In nature, it occurs when we are instantly alerted to the presence of a snake after only spotting a portion of its distinctive scales. Like grouping, pop-out can be achieved with different visual channels. Depending on the data, some techniques will be more effective than others. Pop-out and gestalt grouping can be used to match content to its importance, creating a sequenced appreciation for the reader that first attracts, and then holds their attention as they visually unpack individual chunks.
Threat detection quickly identifies potentially dangerous stimuli such as snakes, spiders, and angry faces in a crowd.
Across graphic design, many trade-offs are considered in pursuit of information harmony. As I warned, it threatens to distract us on a dazzling journey deep into the history of two-dimensional art. The methodical geometric abstraction of De Stijl paintings closely resembles the style of modern data visualization, but lessons can be learned from any aesthetic movement. If we pulled the string long enough we would travel all the way back through Egyptian hieroglyphics and Mesopotamian reliefs, perhaps finally resting in Lascaux to marvel at its cave paintings and wonder what was created before and has since been lost to time.