Story/Telling with Data as Distributed Activity

ABSTRACT

Based on a workplace ethnography of an organization referred to as the “Metro Data Cooperative,” this article unpacks the multiple approaches to “storytelling with data” held by research subjects. The research suggests that “storytelling” is more than a discursive form that writers break into. Instead, because there are always multiple statistically supportable stories available, researchers and practitioners should understand storytelling as a malleable activity taking place with regard to multiple organizational and technical influences.

KEYWORDS:

• Workplace studies
• visual rhetoric/visualization techniques
• ethnography
• storytelling

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. To provide a sense of this open-endedness, of 90 interviewer utterances in the first interview, 55 were “filler” language, such as “yeah,” “OK,” “mhm,” or “got it.” My substantive contributions – spaces where I moved interviews forward – were largely points of clarification, stemming from a dialogic process of repeating terms back to interviewees to clarify, expand, or provide examples for a given turn of phrase.

2. Two iterations of “story” that did not appear in proximity to “data” involved (1) “story” used to describe the story of MDC’s progress on specific projects, as told to funders, and (2) “story” as a promotional tool in pitching the report to stakeholders in person. This latter instance did not elaborate on the content of that story, so is unable to be coded definitively.

3. PUMAs are “public use microdata areas,” a geographic designation used by the Census Bureau (2018): “Public use microdata areas (PUMAs) are geographic areas defined to be used with public use microdata sample (PUMS) files. PUMAs are a collection of counties or tracts within counties with more than 100,000 people, based on the decennial census population counts. State partners define PUMAs once a decade after the decennial census. Data for PUMAs are available from the American Community Survey (ACS). PUMS files are available from the ACS and decennial census.”

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Patrick Danner

Patrick Danner is an Assistant Professor of English – Professional Writing at Misericordia University. He specializes in workplace ethnographic research, data visualization, rhetorical mathematics, and activity theory.