A big focus of VisWeek this year was on “Telling Stories with Data”, or turning data visualizations into a narrative form.  It sounds powerful, taking mountains of data and extracting the core essence of the message to relay to the viewer.  However, it also has a dark side common to statistics in that it can easily be manipulated to tell many stories from many different sides, pretty much whatever you want.

One of our goals for the workshop was to learn what humanities scholarship might have to say about the creation of data narratives. In this session, we invited two speakers to lead a discussion of the theoretical aspects of storytelling: what kinds of stories exist, what the component elements of a story are, and how those might be embodied in a visualization.

via Telling Stories with Data, A VisWeek 2010 Workshop.