Storytelling Arc
How do you craft a strong narrative for data?
Through the reading and discussion in class, we explored how narrative structure works in data stories. A data story can be evaluated by how well designed its visualizations are, but there’s also the character, conflict, setting, theme, point of view and narrative structure to consider.
The reading compared three popular narrative models. The three act structure provides a setup, confrontation and resolution, but offers little direction for building a data story. The Hero’s Journey has 17 stages, making it more complex. Freytag’s Pyramid offers a balance, with an introduction, rising action, climax, falling action and resolution.
We used four parts to work through our own story. A hook, rising points, an aha moment, and next steps. This gave us a way to arrange our data and questions into a first storytelling arc for our data center project.
First Pass at Our Storytelling Arc
The hook
What is the cloud?
The cloud is a network of physical servers housed in data centers.
Rising points
Data centers are increasing in the US. Where are they being built, and how much power do they use?
We want to show the actual amount of power in megawatts. But first, what is a megawatt? How do we give the audience enough context to understand that number?
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To supply that power, how many power plants are running? Where are they located?
These questions help us move from the locations of data centers to the infrastructure needed to power them.
The aha moment
In our first pass, this was the point where we wanted to say that only two power plants had been documented. But we need to establish what “documented” means and what our dataset actually covers before saying that most emissions go unmeasured.
A gap in our dataset doesn’t necessarily mean the emissions aren’t measured elsewhere. It also doesn’t tell us how much higher the real amount might be.
This part of the story still needs research. What do we know, and what is harder to track? Where does the electricity come from? We’re looking at both captive power plants and the shared grid.
Next steps and call to action
What does this mean for the people sharing that grid?
We want to look at changes in electricity prices and usage, whether homes are paying more, and how those changes relate to data center demand.
Who should be held responsible?
That’s where our first pass currently ends. We still need to work out what we want the audience to do with that information. The arc gives us a structure, but the aha moment and call to action need to come from what we can support with our research.
