The Stats vs. The Story
7. Stories trump information
Stories have closure. This is what sets them apart from ‘“information’, which is by its nature partial, incomplete, fragmentary. Susan Sontag argues this is the ‘moral obligation’ of a writer: to tell stories, because stories will hold our attention and allow us to make moral judgments—not just about what is better ,... See more
Stories have closure. This is what sets them apart from ‘“information’, which is by its nature partial, incomplete, fragmentary. Susan Sontag argues this is the ‘moral obligation’ of a writer: to tell stories, because stories will hold our attention and allow us to make moral judgments—not just about what is better ,... See more
17 things I learned about life by mainlining Maria Popova’s website
Our society has a love/hate relationship with quantification. The consensus is that we’ve OD’d on numbers and need to step back into a more intuitive state. I certainly feel that and find value in it too, but I’m still a number-head.
Through data journalism, I want to humanize statistics. Numbers are a good way to appear credible and smart because they aren’t intuitive. But they are logical. Like that speech from The Big Short, everytime the unemployment rate goes up 1%, 10,000 people lose their lives. It’s easy to mystify real human lives behind data. But imagine the story of
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