A stash for notes from the confluence of a data science career, informative storytelling, an urge to make things, and a love for the wilds.
March means I've been museum focused for a year. Visiting. Volunteering. Interacting with guests, helping collections management. Classes on the skills and technology applied.
I've learned a lot. The museum approach to helping people learn, and helping people desire to learn, is amazing and deep. Museums do not have captive audiences. They have to market learning, make it desirable. And they do. And I think that data scientists should do so too.
Today, as a museum gallery host, I watched a design failure - I'm confident it was unintentional - unnecessarily block access to one of the exhibits. I think it was because of a certain way the design team was all alike.
It was a mock 1920's telegraph, attempting to highlight communications from a small town that did not yet have telephone service. It has a vigorously ruggedized mock telegraph key for the guests to try using morse code to spell out messages. When pressed firmly, it sounds a buzzer so the guest can hear the dit-dah patterns of morse code. It has the same functionality as Morse code trainers had in the era of morse-using telegraphs. The one at the link has a key, a copy of the Morse code version in use at that facility, a buzzer, and a light.
Business schools write a lot of "case studies." I write a lot about data stories. A case study is a "thick" data point, an anecdote, chosen to illustrate an idea.
At the end of an analysis, I can measure how representative a case study is. I can also write a "most-probable-case study", or "archetype study" if you prefer. Or a set of them, to represent varied environments, markets, populations, et cetera.
Read case studies to understand how business leaders are taught. Write them to help business leaders learn, in the way they already know how to learn.
That is the business power of data storytelling.
