03. What is a Data Story

Here is the link to the YouTube video referenced in the video above.

The great 20th century American novelist Kurt Vonnegut posited that fictional stories could be fed into computers, and that an algorithm could determine the shape of the story from beginning to end, depicting the emotional highs and lows that the main characters go through as the story progresses. His operating theory was that many of our most popular and impactful stories show very similar shapes, or templates.

This concept of his is analogous to the idea we’ll be covering in this lesson, that data stories also have distinct forms or types, and that powerful data stories often fall into similar categories with similar attributes.