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Storytelling makes sense of the 'data deluge'

Michelle Avenant
By Michelle Avenant, portals journalist.
Johannesburg, 01 Mar 2016
Lyle Petersen, senior analyst at Woolworths, says storytelling can help us process information overload.
Lyle Petersen, senior analyst at Woolworths, says storytelling can help us process information overload.

Storytelling can be an effective tool for helping people engage with and make sense of the "data deluge", said Lyle Petersen, senior analyst at Woolworths, at the ITWeb Business Intelligence Summit 2016 in Johannesburg on Tuesday.

However much value data and analytics offer, the extreme volumes of information, in a plethora of different formats and from an expanding variety of different sources, can be prohibitively overwhelming, he noted.

In the face of this daunting information overload, it is important to keep in mind that storytelling is a means of processing it that many people find instinctive and welcoming, said Petersen.

"Storytelling is the natural way we communicate... It's the way we link events, it's the way we link insights, it's the way we conceptualise entities," he put forward, adding that "we all enjoy storytelling as some form of entertainment".

Data analysis, too, can be delivered in the form of a story, he posited. By providing scene-setting context to the information, grouping different elements of the data into character or event-like entities, and linking them together in a kind of plotline, data can be made engaging in the same way stories are, he explained.

It is important for people to be able to pick out specific "events" to link together in order to better understand the data being presented to them, he summarised.

By means of example, Petersen noted the growing trend of data journalism - journalists using curated data as a point of departure for analysing economic, political or social trends, or as a means of illustrating them - which is spurred by the various forms of interactive and multimedia-rich data presentation formats enabled by the Web.

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