General Session: Library Storytelling with Data: Argument, Evidence, and Emotion
Learn how to bring data stories to life for library advocacy. Participants will learn about ongoing research identifying classic library stories told to persuade decision-makers as part of the Data Storytelling Toolkit for Librarians grant (IMLS). Tools every library can use include:
- Five classic advocacy arguments
- Evidence and forms of data for those arguments
- Narrative strategies that draw from classic story structures
- Tone and tactics for emotionally engaging storytelling to different audiences, including positive, negative, mixed, and polarized by misinformed/disinforming audience members.
This session is designed to launch a conversation and troubleshoot your data storytelling process. Do you have the right data? Do you put story before storage? What’s your story structure? Who are your audiences and what do you know about their attitudes? What more can you make of the data you have, for important decisions and for your audiences? Join storytelling expert Kate McDowell for a lively interactive session to make data work as evidence for your arguments in story form.