Required Course Text
Storytelling with Data: A Data Visualization Guide for Business Professionals
by Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic | Wiley 2015
Storytelling with Data teaches you the fundamentals of data visualization and how to communicate effectively with data.
You’ll discover the power of storytelling and the way to make data a pivotal point in your story. The lessons in this illuminative text are grounded in theory, but made accessible through numerous real-world examples—ready for immediate application to your next graph or presentation. Storytelling is not an inherent skill, especially when it comes to data visualization, and the tools at our disposal don’t make it any easier. This book demonstrates how to go beyond conventional tools to reach the root of your data, and how to use your data to create an engaging, informative, compelling story. |
About the Author | Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic
My goal is to help rid the world of ineffective graphs, one exploding, 3D pie chart at a time. My name is Cole. I've always had a penchant for turning data into pictures and into stories. I'd like to share what I have learned (and am learning) with you. I've honed my data visualization skills over the past decade through analytical roles in banking, private equity, and most recently at Google, where I developed and taught a course on communicating effectively with data.
In school, we learn much about language and math. In language, we are taught how to tell stories. In math, we are taught how to make meaning out of numbers. But it's rare that the two are paired: we don't learn how to make stories out of numbers or how to enable data to speak. This means we often rely on our tools to help us understand best practices. And our tools allow us to easily do some very bad things (e.g., 3D, pie charts, meaningless color). |
Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic tells stories with data. She is the author of Storytelling With Data: A Data Visualization Guide for Business Professionals and writes the popular blog www.storytellingwithdata.com. Her well-regarded workshops and presentations are highly sought after by data-minded individuals, companies, and philanthropic organizations all over the world.