What ‘Counts’ as Statistical Communication?

Amelia McNamara @AmeliaMN

University of St Thomas

We can all agree communication is important

“Key concepts required to develop data acumen include mathematical foundations, computational foundations, statistical foundations, data management and curation, data description and visualization, data modeling and assessment, workflow and reproducibility, communication, domain-specific considerations, and ethical problem solving.”

“Key Competencies for an undergraduate Data Science Major

  • Computational and Statistical Thinking
  • Mathematical Foundations
  • Model Building and Assessment
  • Algorithms and Software Foundation
  • Data Curation
  • Knowledge Transference – Communication and Responsibility”

“Recommendation 2.1: Academic institutions should embrace data science as a vital new field that requires specifically tailored instruction delivered through majors and minors in data science as well as the development of a cadre of faculty equipped to teach in this new field.”

“As instructors rework individual classes based on outcomes and evaluation, it is likely that they will replace borrowed content from existing courses with original materials that fit together more naturally and better match personal educational styles or the culture of that institution or department.”

(Some) types of communication

  • Visualizing data
  • Writing data
  • Speaking data

Exemplar programs

Data Communication and Visualization

At the University of St Thomas, I teach a class which includes all three elements.

  • Visualizing data (main focus)
  • Writing about data
  • Speaking about data

Textbook

Communicating with Data: The Art of Writing for Data Science. Deborah Nolan and Sara Stoudt.

Key elements of data communication

Audience

Who is your communication for?

Content

What is your communication about?

Both of these elements make this hard!

Audience

Are we primarily interested in an audience of other statisticians, or an audience of laypeople?

Content

Where does the content come from, and are you a disciplinary expert?

Some example assignments

Visualizing data– handmade data viz

Begin with inspiration.

In my classes, I talk about visualization as art, as well as art as visualization. (What ‘counts’?)

Visualizing data– handmade data viz

Curate a small dataset. I recommend fewer than 10 rows, but at least two variables.

Name Area Max.depth Watershed.area Chain.of.lakes?
Bde Maka Ska 421 acres 89.9 feet 2,992 acres Yes
Lake Harriet 353 acres 82. feet 1,139 acres Yes
Lake Nokomis 204 acres 33.1 feet 869 acres No
Cedar Lake 170 acres 50.9 feet 1,956 acres Yes
Lake of the Isles 103 acres 30.8 feet 735 acres Yes

Bring craft supplies!

Visualizing data– handmade data viz

Share out afterward

Visualizing data– social media

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A post shared by Twin Cities Habitat (@tchabitat)

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A post shared by People Incorporated (@peopleincorp)

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Writing about data

Is Code the Best Way to Represent a Data Analysis?. Roger Peng, Simply Statistics, 2022.

“Looks okay to me”: A study of best practice in data analysis code review. Amal Abdel-Ghani, Kelly Bodwin, Amelia McNamara, Allison Theobold, and Ian Flores Siaca. ICOTS11, 2022.

Writing about data– one number story

“Keep the number of digits in a paragraph below eight.”

“You’d be over your allocation with a sentence like this: The Office of Redundancy’s budget rose 48 percent in 2013, from $700.3 million to $1.03 billion.

Think about how it could change:

Over the past year, the Office of Redundancy’s budget grew by nearly half, to $1 billion.”

– Sarah Cohen, Numbers in the Newsroom

Writing about data– one number story

Focus on one number (but use more numbers to contextualize it!)

That number might be the mean, the median, the maximum, the total…

Use simple data tools— in my class, we use spreadsheets for this assignment (sort, summarize, pivot tables).

  • “Boston Wins The High School Dropout Race”
  • “Massachusetts Academy of Math and Science Remains Atop the Podium”
  • “10 High Schools in Massachusetts had a Perfect Graduation Rate in 2016”
  • “New Century School Math Achievement Grows Again”
  • “Math achievement lower for SLP students of color”

Writing about data– Wikipedia articles

Four times now, I have had students author Wikipedia articles about people who did not previously have them.

  • Carmen Batanero
  • Karl Broman
  • Jenny Bryan
  • Andreas Buja
  • Catherine D’Ignazio
  • Nick Horton
  • Jessica Hullman
  • Jeff Leek
  • Thomas Lumley
  • Giorgia Lupi
  • Regina Nuzzo
  • Tawana Petty
  • Stefanie Posavec
  • Julia Silge
  • Julia Stewart Lowndes
  • Antony Unwin

Writing about data– executive summaries

Speaking about data– lightning talk

A 5-minute talk on something that is “data-adjacent.”

  • Describe a particular R package
  • Talk through an interesting data analysis someone else has done. You might look through your Data Diaries for ideas, or page through sites with data journalism like The Upshot, FiveThirtyEight and ProPublica.
  • Tell us about the person you wrote your Wikipedia article about
  • Find a connection between a hobby and data science

Speaking about data– social media

@the.data.guy

Draft from live build the other day. Posted the full 45 min build to YT. Cool but not meaningful yet.

♬ Elevator Music - Bohoman

Does this ‘count’?

Commonalities

  • Think about audience
  • Begin with inspiration
  • Start small and simple
  • Iterate and give feedback

Thank you

@AmeliaMN

www.amelia.mn

Tell us about the dress

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