When I let people know that I’m spending half my work week enmeshed in data science curriculum, I’m not sure storytelling is what first comes to their mind. But it is what comes to mine.
Let’s rewind back a bit. When I moved to Washington, D.C. at 19 and started an apprenticeship in a program the NY Times dubbed "an alternative to college for the digital elite", my technical skills were minimal. I had no idea what the command line was and couldn’t read any code past the most basic of HTML.
What I did come in with, however, was a brief background in applying strategy to help marketing campaigns grow and a deep hunger to become an integral part of a company.
My apprenticeship placed me at a startup named Brazen. It’s likely worth mentioning that while stationed there for a year – the company grew over 5x, raised another round of funding, changed its name, and received recognition after recognition in the DC startup scene. Within this role, I gained a family. And as any family does, especially one rooted in the trenches of a quickly growing tech startup during some of my most impressionable years, they left quite the imprint.
One of the facets of that imprint was a new skill that completely altered the way I think, and my future trajectory – the programming language MySQL. Now, MySQL (pronounced My-Ess-Que-Ell) allows one to query a database and essentially ask and answer questions at varying levels of complexity.
I’m not sure our CTO Jason knew quite what he opened up when he offered to bridge the gap between online curriculum and real-world application via Brazen’s software as a service (SaaS), but my value to the company leveled up. I became a resource for my non-technical coworkers and gave our developers more deep work hours that were integral to the health of our company. I soon embodied a truly unique role by supporting coworkers across departments, helping define what success looked like for our customers, and by uncovering new intel on our platform users that bolstered our fundraise. That feeling when I drew upon the power of data stuck with me. This changed my lens on the world and how I tackled problems that arose.
Fast forward to today. My work over the past two years has brought me exposure to some of our nation’s greatest storytellers – and many of them are focused on bringing light to some of our world’s most dimly lit places.
One such maverick, Ava Duvernay, and her company Array, partnered with Participant Media to bring a deeper dive into narratives like When They See Us through learning companions that take you past the award-winning Netflix series and into the heart of the issues it tackles around criminalization and inequity.
Another influential storyteller, Scott Budnick, and his company One Community, previously launched the film Just Mercy and brought exposure to the late Walter "Johnny D." McMillan who was wrongfully incarcerated. Despite dozens of people that could testify to his alibi, including a police officer, a jury recommended a life sentence. Walter’s story and later release due to Bryan Stevenson’s efforts, was primarily relayed through actors Michael B Jordan, Jamie Fox, and Brie Larson. Just Mercy brought in over $50 million worldwide and newfound support for Stevenson’s Equal Justice Initiative.
One Community says its mission is "to harness the power of storytelling to inspire and encourage positive change in the world". Now, do a quick exercise with me, and replace storytelling with data. These formats can really go hand in hand in innovative ways that start to bend where data ends and where stories begin. Stick with me here.
Our world is becoming increasingly diverse and we’re demanding stories that better reflect our realities. As the first volume of media company MACRO’s The New World states, "out with the status quo, in with The Culture. Out with the way things were, in with the way things will be."
In that same vein, I believe we’ll see innovative use cases where real-world data informs compelling narratives and unique structures of truth-telling and dissemination. As technology continues advancing exponentially and we get an increasingly diverse technical workforce – who says data scientists shouldn’t have a seat at an org like Array or One Community. We’d have the opportunity to storyboard and advise on a narrative direction based on the data. To be able to dictate how a character might traverse based on an intention to expose stories previously in the shadows and not thought to have a market. The ability to generate empathy that gives us a case and the financial means to collect increasingly clear data and create algorithms that work for us. We’d play an integral role in enabling systems that expose us to where societal needs truly lie and lead us not only to imagine a different future but perhaps to prove how we’ll get there.
I see a positive correlation between data and truth-telling, how an increase in narratives that expose the realities of our systems of power can directly bring about awareness and positive change in a way that better meets our needs and becomes a system deserving of us. I believe the lengths at which Data Science and storytelling relate have yet to be fully defined and that we’ve got a lot of work ahead of us. I also see folks connecting those dots and building that infrastructure today. Imagine what our world’s greatest storytellers can do with an empowered and versatile data scientist at the table.
So yes, I’m devoting a year of my life (at minimum) to storytelling because we as data scientists have the power to further expose the landscape and systems of power that currently influence our world. There are many, many more stories to be uncovered and explored.
"Out with the status quo, in with The Culture. Out with the way things were, in with the way things will be."
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