6 ways AI can improve your data storytelling.

6 ways to improve your data storytelling.

Generative AI is "artificial intelligence (AI) that can create original content—such as text, images, video, audio or software code—in response to a user’s prompt or request."

These capabilities make it effective at querying, summarising and visualising large, complex datasets.

In the embedded link, Datacamp outline 6 ways Generative AI can enhance storytelling:

1. Enhancing data visualisation

2. Automating data preparation

3. Generating natural language summaries

4. Creating interactive dashboards

5. AI storytelling assistants

6. Enhancing AR/VR data visualisations

For each of the ways, an example Generative AI solution is provided.

Tableau's Ask Data & Power BI's QnA features are referenced in "Enhancing data visualisation". Ask Data provides the ability to select the most appropriate chart, whilst Power BI ‘s QnA feature the ability to ask natural language questions of the data.

Below is a summary of the Generative AI tools for the remaining 5:

• Automating data preparation; DataRobot's autopilot replaces missing dataset values

• Generating natural language summaries; Arria summaries financial data

• Creating interactive dashboards; Instachart produces dashboard mockups from hand-drawn sketches and text prompts

• AI storytelling assistants; Chat GPT's Data Analyst analyses datasets, providing insights

• Enhancing AR/VR data visualisations; Flowimmersive creates interactive data visualisations using Augmented Reality(AR).

These examples demonstrate that using Generative AI saves considerable time and effort. However, as a cautionary note, in last weeks newsletter, I reviewed an article from The Pudding on whether an AI can make a data driven visual story. 

They graded Anthropic's Claude a C+ (in it’s data storytelling capability), concluding that there’s a place in the process for AI. However, data storytelling can't be completely left to the AI.

Yay, for humans!

PS: Datacamp's Data and AI Literacy month begins this September, with events, podcasts and articles focusing on data and AI literacy.

More supporting links

Seven Tricks for Better Data Storytelling Part 1

Seven Tricks for Better Data Storytelling Part 2 

Information is Beautiful; Dataviz of the Month.

Data visualisation is the graphical representation of information and data. By using visual elements like charts, graphs, and maps, data visualisation tools provide an accessible way to see and understand trends, outliers, and patterns in data.

Information is Beautiful make sense of the world with infographics & data-visuals.

They published their favourite visualisations a) created by themselves or b) by others, for the period June / July 2024.

A successful visualisation (imho) doesn’t need further explanation. You may need a moment to orientate, but once locked in, the subject matter, the story(s) behind the data becomes apparent.

I've picked out "life expectancy" and "the world as 100 people" from each of the above categories.

With live long (life expectancy), the sliding +/- years scale and use of colours makes it clear what activities to pursue (hang out with women - a lot!) which to avoid (alcohol) and / or minimise (obesity).

In the world as 100 people there are immediate questions and disparities, such as :

• 75 have cell phones, only 30 have internet access!

• High literacy rate, 83 can read and write, yet only 7 have a college degree

Both visualisations draw our attention, inform and educate in equal measure.

The “ultimate recipe” to live long was “Married happy go-lucky outdoors-loving sex-mad hippy party-girl in senior management with a cat.”

Ok, that’s specific!

To explain their approach to the visualisations, dive into the datasets, understand the patterns; just as the authors did ,in order to get to the ultimate live long recipe and the world as 100 visualisations.

Data Visualisation: Why it is one of the top data skills for 2024

30 resources for mastering data visualisation

Helpful Lists; Dataviz blogs, courses and tools.

Blogs - from those referenced in the newsletter

• Datacamp Blog; a range of topics from AWS to Tableau

• Information is Beautiful; includes previous month winners

• Jack Hagley; the world as 100 people author

• Power BI; all things Microsoft Power BI

• Tableau; data literacy, the future of data and of course visualisations

Courses - platform search queries

• Coursera data visualisation course search

• edX data visualisation courses 

• Tableau courses

• Udemy data visualisation courses

Tools - some of the usual suspects, but also some new ones!

• Top 10 free tools for data visualisation

• The best data visualisation tools of 2024

• 23 best visualisation tools you can't miss

The long read

need more?! 😊

check out this long form article where Stirworld interview graphic designer Adrien Jacquemet and web developer Basile Jesset on their Shapes of Data project.

The aim of the project is to capture new ways of capturing and visualising data. It's packed with examples including one of my fave sites Radiooooo