Relate your data to the world around them using the age-old custom of telling a story.
A recent column made the analogy between creating figures and writing. These are similar processes that benefit equally from clarity, precision and restraint1. Just as writing is made more compelling by a strong narrative, this principle also applies to the accompanying figures.
Stories have the capacity to delight and surprise and to spark creativity by making meaningful connections between data and the ideas, interests and lives of your readers. Science is “full of vexing questions, conflict, dead ends, insights and the occasional thrilling leap” and, as such, is “a story well told”2. At the Story Collider (http://www.storycollider.org/), this approach to science reporting is exemplified by compelling narratives.
Familiar elements underpin most stories: introduction, question, conflict, buildup and resolution. These can also be applied to data graphics. For example, use the idea of a story arc and make your presentation episodic—unfold it, don't dump it. In each part, make not only its content clear but its purpose easily discernible. This is particularly relevant when communicating to the general public, who may lack sufficient background knowledge to identify what is relevant or why it matters. At the same time, do not underestimate your colleagues' desire to be presented with a cogent exposition of your findings.
Maintain focus of your presentation by leaving out detail that does not advance the plot. Distinguish necessary detail from minutiae; do not give in to the desire to show all your hard-won data. Provide sufficient support for your story, but stick to the plot. Inviting readers to draw their own conclusions is risky because even simple messages can hide in simple data sets (Fig. 1). Telling a story is as much a process as it is an art. To help you get started, consider the following: “If your study were reported in the newspaper, what would the headline be?”3.
An example of storytelling with data is shown in Figure 2. Targeted at a general audience, the information graphic motivates the effect of smoking rate on cancer statistics. The story begins with intrigue: cancer incidence is rising, but death rates are declining. The grimmer trend is presented first to immediately build tension. Insightful readers may expect that the primary reason is improved diagnostics and therapies, but the graphic surprises them by linking the inverse relationship to changes in smoking habits. The first two panels of the figure provide the background necessary for this plot twist to be appreciated. The vertical scale is chosen to accentuate the similarity of the death rates for males due to cancer in aggregate and to lung cancer in panels 2 and 3.
We have previously encouraged the use of practical graphic design principles to inform the content and layout of figure panels. Now we propose that you apply the structural principles of storytelling to integrate multiple panels into a cohesive whole. Instead of “explain, not merely show,” seek to “narrate, not merely explain.”
References
Krzywinski, M. Nat. Methods 10, 371 (2013).
Revkin, A.C. The New York Times Dot Earth Blog http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/31/story-collider-where-science-is-a-story-well-told/ (2013).
Ableson, R.P. Statistics as Principled Argument (Psychology Press, New York, 1995).
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Krzywinski, M., Cairo, A. Storytelling. Nat Methods 10, 687 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1038/nmeth.2571
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nmeth.2571
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