Data-Driven Writing Prompts (for Humans): Creative Writing Meets Data Storytelling

Music City Center 

Being able to find the story in the data can seem like an elusive learning goal. What makes a good story, what is the process of discovering it, and how do we help students tell it well? In this talk I will share lessons learned from working with creative writers and students to design an interactive data exploration app to inspire creative writing about the environment. A key feature of this app is the accompanying writing prompts that help guide users towards features of the data that may be particularly generative. I will discuss the relationship between what makes a good writing prompt and what makes a good story and share writing prompts that can be transferred to a variety of statistics and data science classroom settings.