This summer, Boston University’s College of Communication will hold its fifth series of Data + Narratives Storytelling Workshops, a week-long program that trains students and professionals to interpret data sets to improve their storytelling skills. The workshops are the first of their kind in that they are designed for participants with three distinct levels of experience.
Seven skills are taught at the workshop, said program founder and director Maggie Mulvihill, who has been a data and investigative journalist for more than 30 years. These skills include obtaining data, analyzing it and presenting a powerful data-driven story.
“There’s a huge demand for reporters who have data skills,” Mulvihill said. “If you know how to work with data, and you’re a journalist, you have a much better chance of getting a job today.”
Mulvihill said she came up with the idea for the conference after realizing that some of the data skills she had been learning at her journalism conferences were taught only by statisticians and computer scientists.
“My idea was to flip that,” Mulvihill said. “We’re the storytellers. We’re the ones who know how to masterfully put information together in an impactful way and arrive at a particular result.”
When planning the workshops, Mulvihill considered the potential revenue they would bring to the Department of Journalism. So far, she said, they have been very successful at doing just that while training people within other disciplines.
Hundreds of participants have come from all over the United States and other countries, including Australia, Brazil, Italy and Germany to attend the workshops, Mulvihill said.
Participants include both students and professionals, Mulvihill said, and they come from a variety of fields and specializations, such as marketing, engineering and government agencies.
“Everyone today, not just journalists, has to tell a story with data,” Mulvihill said. “That’s why [the workshops] appeal to so many people.”
Although students and professionals are not separated within the classes, the workshops are divided into three different levels based on participants’ familiarity with data. The most advanced level learns how to tell a story using R, a programming language widely used for statistical computing and graphing.
Margot Williams, an investigative reporter who teaches at the workshops, interacts with all three of the levels, giving participants the basic background knowledge they need to find reliable sources of data, verify the sources of the data and occasionally, set up their own data set.
Williams said obtaining data sets now is even more important than it was in the past.
“Course numbers can lie and statistics can lie, but I think about the data as if it were a source,” Williams said. “I fact-check it and query it and do all the things you would do with all your sources to make sure that you’re getting verifiable information.”
Upon completion of the workshop, which will take place June 4–8, participants will receive a digital badge, a digital credential that showcases data skills on online portfolios and resumes.
“Paper resumes just aren’t used anymore,” Mulvihill said. “Everyone has online portfolios that this credential could be added to. And they’re in high demand today.”
The workshops have generated sufficient revenue for the Department of Journalism to buy data sets, gain access to requested public records and host events for journalism students, among other things, Mulvihill said.
A hands-on learning experience for the most common programming tools is an important thing to learn, Williams said, but even more important is the ability to integrate the data to form a narrative.
“You have to have a narrative, or no one is going to look at your spreadsheet,” Williams said. “It’s all about having a story, and if it’s going to be a good story, it has to be a verifiable and correct story.”
CORRECTION: A previous version of this article implied that all the data skills Mulvihill had been learning at her journalism conferences were taught only by statisticians and computer scientists. The sentence has been changed to clarify that not all of the data skills Mulvihill had been learning at her journalism conferences were taught only by statisticians and computer scientists.
