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Episode #77: John Yorke
177 Plays8 years ago
I’m calling March the “Month of Story.” Kicking off with the Tapestry Conference in St. Augustine, Florida, the Socrata Connect conference in Washington, DC on March 7, and ending with the Malofiej Infographic World Summit in Pamplona, Spain, I’m focusing on...
The post Episode #77: John Yorke appeared first on PolicyViz.
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Transcript
Podcast Introduction
00:00:00
Speaker
This episode of the PolicyViz podcast is brought to you by JMP, Statistical Discovery Software from SAS. JMP, spelled J-M-P, is an easy to use tool that connects powerful analytics with interactive graphics. The drag and drop interface of JMP enables quick exploration of data to identify patterns, interactions, and outliers.
00:00:19
Speaker
JUMP has a scripting language for reproducibility and interfacing with R. Click on this episode's sponsored link to receive a free info kit that includes an interview with DataVis experts Kaiser Fung and Alberto Cairo. In the interview, they discuss information gathering, analysis, and communicating results.
Storytelling Focus & Guest Introduction
00:00:49
Speaker
Welcome back to the Policy This Podcast. I'm your host, John Schwabisch. March, for me, is turning out to be the month of story. I have two talks I'm giving this month, including a talk at the Milofie Infographics Summit in Pamplona, Spain, which I've been working hard on. I've been thinking a lot about how we tell stories with data and what that word story means.
00:01:09
Speaker
There's been a lot of writing about this and thought about this. And so I've been spending a lot of time thinking about it myself. And so on this week's episode, I'm very excited to have on the show, John York, who has written the recent book Into the Woods, a five act journey into story. It sort of kicked off a lot of my thinking about what we really mean when we think about story. So I'm excited to have
00:01:33
Speaker
A different kind of guest on the show this week. We're not going to talk about code. We're not going to talk about platforms. We're going to talk about story. John, thanks for coming on the show. I'm excited to chat with you today. My pleasure. Thank you for having me.
John York's Background & Motivation
00:01:45
Speaker
OK, so we have talked already in depth several times about story. And I want to get to what we mean by story. But maybe for those who aren't familiar with you or this book, you can just give us a little bit of your background and background on what it takes to write a book about story.
00:02:02
Speaker
Sure, background-wise, I started in radio about 30, 35 years ago, moved over to television, worked for the BBC for many years, and then went to Channel 4, which is one of the bigger terrestrial commercial channels in the UK, and I was head of drama at Channel 4 for two years before I moved back to the BBC as head of drama production and ongoing training as well. And I did that job for about 10 years before
00:02:31
Speaker
swimming off on my own to form my own independent and write books like this one. So I've been working in the industry solidly all my life. And I just felt there was a lot of books about storytelling, but I did feel there was a gap for one more. Right. So maybe you can give us a feeling for what this book is about and how it fits that hole in the
British Skepticism of Storytelling
00:02:52
Speaker
literature there.
00:02:53
Speaker
Sure. You have to remember, in the UK, we were very, very suspicious of anybody writing about the craft of storytelling. Far more so than I think in America. One of the great British writers, Alan Plaser, who died recently, he wrote
00:03:09
Speaker
thousands of incredibly highly respected TV shows boasted that the proudest moment of his life was punching Sid Field in the face. And that seemed symptomatic of the British attitude that drama and the study of drama is an art, is not craft and not something you can practice. Now, that's changing slowly, but it's not quite to the extent it is in the US.
00:03:34
Speaker
I think the reason why is because when you read screenwriting books, most screenwriting books, they tell you, and I'm obviously paraphrasing massively, there has to be an inciting incident on page 22. But what none of these books do is tell you why. And if you've come from any kind of academic background, you realise that without the why, everything else cannot stand.
00:04:01
Speaker
it will not be taken seriously in academic circles. So I went to the professor of English at the University of London and I said to him, what do you think of Robert McKee? And he said, who?
00:04:10
Speaker
And this is a really highly respected professor, writer, journalist. And this stuff just isn't taken seriously academic circles, because there's no rigorous academic underpinning, you know, if you have a university education, you know, you have to prove stuff, you know, you can't just say that you have to do this on this page, or this happens because of this, you have to say why. And I couldn't find the why anywhere. So I thought, I was lucky, I had the kind of job that allowed me to start looking
00:04:40
Speaker
because my job was training the next generation of British television writers. And so I spent six years writing a book. We tried to explain where storytelling came from, where structure came from, in particular, and why structure was the shape it was and why there appeared to be a universal pattern and where that came from. So that became my obsession, which led to the book.
00:05:05
Speaker
All right, so let's get to it. So how do you define story?
Defining a Story & Emotional Engagement
00:05:11
Speaker
And is there a succinct way to define story? Or is it one of those things that we just kind of know, but we can't really pin it down? Yeah, well, it depends who you're talking to, the best way to define it. I mean, if you want to be very dry about it, it's a chain of cause and effect wrapped around the truth.
00:05:29
Speaker
fundamentally is a series of links. One thing leads to another because of the other that passes on a proven truth, the story proves the truth. Okay, that's a very dry thing. But it's tied in with the other explanation of what a story is, is why we tell them we tell stories fundamentally, so we can experience what it's like to be somebody else.
00:05:53
Speaker
You have this extraordinary thing going on. You bring some science into it. When you listen to a story and you become engaged in the story, your mirror neurons kick in.
00:06:03
Speaker
and your brainwave starts to mimic the sense of excitement that the protagonist is going through. So when the protagonist jumps, when Indy jumps, when he sees snakes in The Lost Ark, you jump too. Your brainwave sync with theirs, you feel what it's like to be somebody else. So stories really are the essential building block on which society's communities are.
00:06:27
Speaker
I'll build. Yeah. And it's really about the feeling. I mean, you say here in the book, it's the enduring pattern of how someone is found by being lost. All tales then are at some level a journey into the woods. There's the tag of the title. All tales then are at some level a journey into the woods to find the missing part of us to retrieve it and make ourselves whole. I mean, I think that's a key piece about stories, right? Is the emotion, the drama, that's the hook and that's why we care.
00:06:54
Speaker
Yeah, it's all about an emotional response. You know, like, you know, well, what stories understand is, is you can be as rational as anything, but that's not going to convince anyone. You only have to look at the current political scene both where you are and where I am. Right. The facts are meaningless. You can't persuade people with facts, what persuades people, what conveys people to believe one thing or another is emotion. Right.
00:07:19
Speaker
And so it's perceived reality. And so that's what storytelling taps into is it is it provokes an emotional response. So I know data and data visualization isn't your area. But when I think about people who use this phrase telling stories with data,
00:07:36
Speaker
They then say, let's tell a story and we make a chart, right? We make a bar chart or a line chart or whatever. That to me doesn't have the emotion.
Challenges in Data Visualization
00:07:44
Speaker
I mean, it can have emotion if I care a lot. But it's not the same kind of emotion, I don't think. No, we're not identifying with a protagonist for a start. And your rational brain is engaged in interpreting a series of facts rather than
00:08:02
Speaker
going on a journey that takes you into an unknown world and reveals something on the other side. But part of that is how the data is revealed. You can reveal data in a way that has a narrative. So for example, you can say, I'm going to tell you something that's going to blow your mind. 30 years ago, 2% of the population of Arkansas did this.
00:08:26
Speaker
20 years later, 82% did it. How did they get there? But do you need for that to be revealed in a visual way? So let's just think of that line. It goes from 2% to 20%. And I show you this line chart, and I can see it all at one time. And so it's not revealed to me in that time dimension of revealing, right? Like in a book, I have to turn the page to see to get the reveal.
00:08:56
Speaker
The time dimension is really important because so much of narrative relies on suspense and the slow reveal of key information. In the loosest sense of the world, you look at a graph, a graph does tell a story, but it's the loosest interpretation of what a story means. It's not one that is engaging and makes me go, I'm going to sell my house and leave my wife.
00:09:21
Speaker
Unless the story is you're sitting on an earthquake door. Right, or a box of gazillions of dollars. Yes. I feel like when I talk to a lot of people about, well, how are we going to tell a story with this data or with this graph, they say, well, on the first slide, I just show the axes. And then on the second slide, I showed this line. On the third slide, I showed this line. But I think a lot of us are making graphs that are
00:09:44
Speaker
not animated or revealed in that way. We're showing here it is. Here's the data. Here's the thing. But A, it doesn't have that emotion and B, it doesn't have that reveal. And so I don't think it falls into that category of story.
00:09:59
Speaker
No, I mean if a straight-head graph, mostly because of the time dimension means it's just a series of facts which the viewer interprets with the help from if someone is presenting it to them or not. But no, it's not going to have the same effect at all. But if you think about it, it's worth reverse engineering
00:10:20
Speaker
where stories come from a second. So my argument is fundamentally that the structure is really based on the method by which humans accumulate knowledge. So it's a dramatization of the knowledge accretion process, if you like. So storytelling, three acts of storytelling come from I exist, I observe the world, I change. That's very scientific. You know, it's rational observation of the world.
Storytelling's Scientific Roots
00:10:51
Speaker
thesis, antithesis, synthesis would be the purest way of looking at that. And of course, the dramatization and personification of that process is what gives you story structure. So that's all it is fundamentally is dramatic structure is directly linked to the process by which we learn. So if you take something like Breaking Bad, for example, Walter White encounters crystal meth
00:11:19
Speaker
becomes Heisenberg, is a dramatization of the process in which you learn either corruption or the production of crystal meth or the word drug dealing or whatever. So there is a link between science and storytelling, but storytelling is peopled with great characters that incite empathy and jeopardy and anxiety and identification and just emotion basically.
00:11:45
Speaker
What I think is interesting about the Breaking Bad example, to take one example, is that the viewer's relationship with Walter White changes over the course of the whole program, right? You empathize with him, I think, towards the beginning, and then I think your perspective or your feeling towards him changes maybe halfway through the show, the season.
00:12:03
Speaker
Yeah, it takes you into a very interesting place. I mean, I think for it to work properly, you have to love him throughout, even when he's doing things you don't approve of. But you know, it's the same with Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver. You know, the empathy is so powerful, it can take you into a really dark place.
00:12:22
Speaker
Are there other aspects of story that you think good writers or good creators use that really grab people's emotion, that really hook them in? I don't want to say it's a formula, but are there certain aspects that you find? Are those driving pieces? I think the driving pieces of all narrative are a combination of empathy, certainly. So you've got to identify, you can't identify with a graph.
00:12:45
Speaker
But you can identify with the person presenting the graph or the writer writing it. So you know, you warm towards a voice you trust, that feels reliable, that you want to identify with. And then it's really about how and when you choose to reveal information. So if you say I've got this, you will never believe what happened in Arkansas in 1978. That's a narrative technique because you're creating intrigue.
00:13:16
Speaker
And I'm going to tell you, once upon a time, blah, so you continually you're deferring gratification. So narrative really is asking a series of questions to which you don't give the answer straight away. So if you're telling a story of data, then if you're presenting that in a way you want to be attractive, you don't reveal
00:13:40
Speaker
The conclusion to the slide, you know, everything leading up to it is a tease, is a provocation, is a deferral of classification or a point that makes you gasp and reconsider everything.
00:13:52
Speaker
Yeah, I think there's two important things that I want to touch on. So I think the first thing is about the protagonist. So how is the creator of the visualization of the graph? How can that person be identified as the protagonist? I can see if I'm standing in front of a room talking to people and making an argument showing visuals and what have you how people can identify as me as the protagonist because we're there together, I guess. But if I if I hand you my report, how can we as creators of visualizations come through as a protagonist?
00:14:23
Speaker
Well, if it's written, then it depends on the form it's written. If you're just presenting a graph in which there is no passing of time to consume it, so you're just looking at it, then you can't.
00:14:35
Speaker
But if you're following page one, page two, page three, and each page wants you to make the next page, then you're becoming yourself the active protagonist in the discovery. You're becoming the detective. But the standard way is, I mean, if you think of it in terms of rhetoric, if you think of politicians, they're basically standing up and giving you an argument. One of the key ingredients of rhetoric is ethos.
00:14:59
Speaker
which is your ability to identify with the speaker and you get your ethos right you can convince people of anything i think again in your last election you could see this very clearly all his inability to speak the language of the greek gods donald trump.
00:15:18
Speaker
connected with a huge way that people who didn't want to be talked to like that, but wanted somebody who told it like it was. And that's a very powerful rhetorical device in itself. So if you're standing up, making a presentation of data, then it's how you present that in a way that people go, I like this guy. You know, I'm going on a journey with him. Wow, he's led me. You know, if you think of the great public scientists, like Carl Sagan, isn't it? People like that.
00:15:48
Speaker
You're in safe hands. Right. So you're creating an emotional relationship with the theory.
00:15:53
Speaker
through the first presented it. Yeah, that's interesting. I can see how it's easier for me at least to do that when I'm standing in front of people. Yeah. And but doing it through the writing where it may be a dry topic. Oh, you know, I'm looking at this thing, it was 2% in this year, you know, turn the page figure to Oh, look, now it's 19%.
Effective Data Storytelling Techniques
00:16:10
Speaker
But how do I write that in such a way that it is a narrative, it is a story where the reader wants to follow along?
00:16:19
Speaker
I think part of it is research data analysis can be very dry. I mean, there's a question for you really, does it have to be dry?
00:16:27
Speaker
No, and I think that's the big question. I think one of the things that I've been thinking about is how researchers or analysts, we tend to work with a lot of data, but we don't end up ever really talking to people or talking, you know, right? Like, we never, oh, I have this big data set. I have a lot of information. I know there are people who gave this information, but I'm never going to go talk to them. And I don't mean to say that we need to be journalists, per se,
00:16:55
Speaker
But having a conversation with someone to understand their experience, I think helps draw out that emotion, right? And helps make it relevant and personal for the reader. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I mean, the way to look at it, it seems to me is you're using data to present an argument. Right. I mean, this may not be an example that works for everyone. But the one that comes immediately to mind is Al Gore's inconvenient truth.
00:17:24
Speaker
Whereas effectively, he's presenting a lot of data. Right. An hour and a half. And it's how you know, it's for the viewer to judge how successful is he in doing that? Is he reaching a desire audience? So is he reaching an audience beyond the liberal bubble within which he works? You know, there's all those kind of questions, but fundamentally, that's an entertaining way of presenting an argument based on science. Yeah.
00:17:53
Speaker
And, you know, again, it doesn't work for everyone. I mean, you had this problem, and I can't talk about American television because not an expert, but political television, particularly in the UK, changed massively in the late 1960s, early 70s, when journalists realized that dry factual analysis
00:18:12
Speaker
Didn't work people couldn't absorb it. They couldn't understand data. They couldn't picture numbers It just all became meaningless. So they would I think they were trying to there's a program called world in action They were trying to convey the amounts of deaths that occurred through lack of sanitation or whatever and they filmed The community in the north of England. I think I'm this is a memory marching coffins down the street and
00:18:40
Speaker
And immediately what was an abstract became, oh my God, this is a really serious problem. They told the story and they made an emotional story out of it. And so, you know, it's very tabloid, but that's not necessarily a bad thing if you want to communicate
00:18:57
Speaker
important ideas to people that they otherwise would listen to. Yeah. No, I think that's right. Making it relevant for people, trying to get people to connect with it, I think is one of the big challenges of communicating data in general. I think it's one of the things that we see where some of the more popular visualizations
00:19:17
Speaker
are very good at making those connections with people, even if they're not necessarily telling a story the way we've been talking about it in some way, right? They're sort of visceral. They make you think, I don't know, I'm still sort of trying to struggle with this a little bit, but I think the aspect of storytelling may not necessarily need, I'm trying to figure out a way where storytelling, you don't necessarily need a person.
00:19:43
Speaker
or a unit, right? And it's the visual itself, it's the graph itself that makes you feel, it makes you, you know, it really hooks into you, but doesn't necessarily focus on an individual's experience. And I think that's been done in places, but it's not done enough. And I think we are, we being people who work with data in the field are a bit flippant with the term story.
00:20:08
Speaker
Right, so let me ask you, when was the last time you had an emotional response to a graph?
00:20:15
Speaker
Uh, that's a good question, but I, I could think of examples. So I think the example everyone would sort of probably agree on is, uh, periscopic here had a, had a visualization on gun deaths. Um, but I think everybody's can connect with, uh, Neil Halloran has some, I guess they're more documentary videos that take some of the things that you sort of mentioned about, you know, the coffins, but he does sort of some more scrolling visualizations that have aspects of that. But both of those, I'll note both of those have an animation.
00:20:45
Speaker
Yeah, right there video or there's an animation on top before you go into the visualization. I can't think of many off the top of my head or it's a static graph that makes me feel and maybe the only exception to that is this visualization on deaths in Iraq that came out of believe Reuters or Hong Kong that I'll link to on the show notes, but
00:21:07
Speaker
It has some of those aspects, but it's so that's one of the few examples, I think, of static visualizations that have an emotional hook. Whereas many that I that I'm thinking of just up my head are they have this animation, they have this time sequence. Yeah. Whereas you said they're building towards something. It's the slow reveal of information. Right. Yeah. Right. That's a story because there's a causal argument. Yep.
00:21:32
Speaker
You know, and when it is just static, I mean, in terms of the gun death thing is a good example, is your reaction is, you know, you're the protagonist because you, you've worked it out yourself. So effectively, if you're part of the analogy, you're the detective in the drama, you cut out the middleman, it's so clear and so shocking, so immediately that you have an immediate visceral emotional response. And you go, this graph tells me a story.
00:21:58
Speaker
And the other counterpart to that is, and I must do something about it. You know, that's when you've got an emotional response and it's early to action.
00:22:08
Speaker
Yeah, it's a spurring to action that we want people to do and that's probably maybe another level, time for another discussion. The other piece that you mentioned is this sort of reveal in the case of giving a presentation where you want to hold off on the conclusion of the graph.
Narrative Techniques in Data Presentations
00:22:28
Speaker
And I'd say there's a bit of a mix there, because what I like to do when I talk, if it's sort of a research or an academic talk, is give my conclusion up front. I'm going to show you that this 2% increase in this thing is going to lead to a 5% increase in this other thing. But I think then, throughout the remaining part of that presentation, within there, I'm trying to build the drama or build the emotion or build that sort of uncertainty.
00:22:56
Speaker
But overall, my audience knows where I'm going. Yeah. So how does that work in sort of the traditional storytelling? Do you want to give people a sense of where you're going? No. That's really bad storytelling. Yeah. Well, it is if you don't subvert it. Good storytelling is where you show them an ending four weeks earlier.
00:23:22
Speaker
and then you build and then you reconceive the first ride. So it means something different to what you thought. Right. So that would... Yeah. So like American Beauty, you know he's going to die, right? He tells you right at the front. Inception. Yeah. You know, you see the ending scene right at the beginning, so you know how it ends, but you don't know how you get there. Exactly. Right. So the more common technique is films begin with a crisis. You know, there's someone in peak jeopardy.
00:23:52
Speaker
And then you do the four weeks earlier and then you work all the way back to that crisis and then through it to a resolution. But normally in drama, in all storytelling really, it's very unusual to start with the conclusion because then why would people stay? Because dramatic narrative is all about the deferral of gratification. And if you're gratified at the top,
00:24:19
Speaker
It's interesting if you're fascinated by the workings out and how you get there, but it's much more powerful narratively to say, we were exploring or we did a lot of work in this and you won't believe what we found. We thought we were going to get this or anything that makes you go, what? Tell me. You don't tell them. You build up to it. That's the classic narrative technique.
00:24:47
Speaker
Yeah. So in those examples where you give people the ending first, what is that attribute or the characteristic of that that you need to do? You need to say, I'm going to give you the ending, but I've, I've got to give you something that makes you say, well, how did you get there? Yeah, right. Exactly. You know, uh, yeah, I mean, it's exactly here. You know, like, yeah, this is the ending. You won't believe how we got there. This is a very crass way of a non-scientific way of doing it. All it takes in something like that is, but while we were working
00:25:17
Speaker
this out, we discovered something even more extraordinary. Dramatic pause. Immediately, when he goes, what? But first, let me take you back to Tuesday, the 30th of March, 2012. And you're in. And you're in, yeah. And you're hooked. And it's all about that hook, yep. I mean, I watch a lot of people give PowerPoint presentations in my life because I do a lot of big talks with businesses and things like that.
00:25:47
Speaker
And you can see the difference very, very clearly when people know how to structure at all. And the ones that work are the ones structured like a narrative. And the ones that don't work are just a series of facts delivered in a motto. They're relying on the presentation to do the work for them.
00:26:08
Speaker
Right. Wow. This is really interesting.
Episode Wrap-up & Book Promotion
00:26:12
Speaker
I think why don't we stop for now and we'll pick it up again, because I think people are, you know, they're probably on their way to work and, you know, have to, you know, turn off their headphones. And so, John, thanks so much for coming on the show. John's book is Into the Woods, a five act journey into story. Really enjoyed it. Read the whole thing almost through twice. So, John, thanks so much for coming on the show and talking about maybe an aspect of storytelling that you may not have
00:26:37
Speaker
fought too much about. So I appreciate you coming on the show. It's been a pleasure. Thank you very much. And thanks to everyone for tuning into this week's episode. I know a little bit of a change of pace. I hope refreshing change of pace. So thanks for tuning in. So until next time, this has been the policy of this podcast.
00:27:05
Speaker
This episode of the PolicyViz podcast is brought to you by JMP, Statistical Discovery Software from SAS. JMP, spelled J-M-P, is an easy to use tool that connects powerful analytics with interactive graphics. The drag and drop interface of JMP enables quick exploration of data to identify patterns, interactions, and outliers.
00:27:24
Speaker
JUMP has a scripting language for reproducibility and interfacing with R. Click on this episode's sponsored link to receive a free info kit that includes an interview with DataVis experts Kaiser Fung and Alberto Cairo. In the interview, they discuss information gathering, analysis, and communicating results.