Measurement, Meaning and Momentum: Storytelling in the Age of Data Wendy Levy, New Arts Axis February 2013

  2  

“I’m tired of awareness, where is the change?” Sally Osberg, Skoll Foundation

The theme of Media that Matters this year is measurement. And you’re here. Thank you.

That’s some impact right there.

I’ve learned it’s a good idea to start a longish talk with a funny video, and I actually found one

right on point, the point about the challenge of supposedly open data. I knew I’d crossed over

to the dark side of data geekdom when this animation had me laughing out loud. [show video

from NYU School of Medicine]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=N2zK3sAtr-4

At conferences like this we’ve been talking about participatory and social media, about the

people formerly known as the audience. Well, things have shifted a bit. We are now the data

formerly known as people.

We need data to measure impact. Measuring impact really means measuring changes – in

perception, behavior, policy, and creativity -- the scope of social change. Dan Green of the

Gates Foundation wrote a great piece for Skoll World Forum online recently called Eyeballs

and Impact – and in it he asked, “are we measuring the right things if we care about social

progress?”

And there are so many other questions.

Do we really know what we need to be measuring? Do we understand the implications of the

data we create? Do we have access to the data we need? The animation showed a few of

the challenges of supposedly open data – which is one of the best reasons to start early and

integrate a data and impact strategy at the beginning of your project.

  3  

It seems at this moment, it is both crucial and radical to ask, what impact are we having on

the audiences we reach?”

It’s well accepted that we need to get beyond only counting the lowest hanging social metrics

- pageviews, impressions, Facebook likes, retweets -- to devise better ways of assessing

how our work changes the world around us.

I’m here not because I’m a data science geek. In my heart I’m a documentary filmmaker and

media producer with training and experience in a range of the arts - classical music,

experimental theater, modern dance, writing – and all have impacted how I see and navigate

the world. I love dogs & walks on the beach. And yes, I did co-found an opensource data

and storytelling platform last year called Sparkwise. While building and launching our beta

site (with deep gratitude to the Macarthur, Gates, Ford, Fledgling and Wyncote Foundations),

my storytelling self learned all about Python, XML and JSON, interaction design, widgets and

comparative analytics. It was a process, a paradigm shift.

Along the way, I also learned that Life is about the information and experiences our bodies

and minds generate, and how we use that information to help heal the world. We are walking

and talking data sources.

When we talk about data at conferences like this, the enthusiastic roar of the audience often

reduces to the collective groan of the assembled producers. When you are busy in

production, bringing the stories and characters to life, the data stuff feels tedious and so

beside the point. But like it or not, we are in the era of big data, and if we don’t play, we’re out

on the porch. The sidelines. The old school. The train has left the station, and here we are,

tickets in hand, making sense of the many metaphors that stand in for our relevance as

artists. If we don’t make sense of the data we create, if we don’t take control of the data we

inspire, the data we embody, the data we generate that is our stories and our culture – we

might as well be shouting into tin cups connected by a string.

I’d like to thank Anjelica Das, Pat Aufderheide and the Center for Social Media for inviting me

to help frame the conference this year – its actually completely ironic that I’m holding this

  4  

particular space. I still count on my fingers, have not taken a math class since 1975, and if I

see another map with little bubbles all over it I’m going to scream. I’m here because I’m a

filmmaker and cultural activist with a big mouth who needs to be needed – so I figured I

better get good at translating innovation for the artists I respect most. I’m here because I

believe deeply in the power of stories and data to disrupt how we think, impact how we act,

intervene in the status quo. And yes, change the world. I’m here to shake things up a little.

Let me take a couple of steps back. In my past life as a waitress at Chez Panisse, I was the

quintessential data-informed storyteller. My audience demanded stories:

• tell me about the most popular dish on the menu,

• the number of farmers who sell produce at the back door,

• where their farms are located,

• the number of cooks who open their own restaurants and where those places are,

• the number of schools in the country with edible schoolyards,

• the percentage of kids whose grades improved when they start growing and cooking

their own lunches,

• the impact of backyard composting,

• the numbers and types and breeds of goats that make the cheese,

• how many organic wines,

• how much fair trade,

• the degree of pepperiness of the arugula,

• the time of the first sighting of the pluot, and on and on.

It was an original and passionate voicing of the sustainable food movement; It was an

exchange, a full on two-way conversation between me …and my section. Because I had

work to do and 7 other tables to serve, including the Dalai Lama and Bill Clinton -- thinking

back, my responses in the moment were like tweets. Only the dudes who created Twitter

hadn’t been born yet. For real, Berklandia predated Portlandia by decades. The cool thing

was that the restaurant was a delicious and interactive experience which supported data that

enriched the stories which raised awareness which fed the campaigns and inspired a public

  5  

which encouraged massive personal behavior shifts which will hopefully help slow the

destruction of the planet. [deep breath]

Check it: Rich white people eating organic local food doesn’t seem to matter if we can’t figure

out how keep children safe in elementary school, end the scourge of global poverty, and the

trafficking, exploitation and murder of women and girls -- but we must try. And each effort

matters. Conviction and intention matter. Stories matter. Stories incent and inspire the

movements that spark the change. Stories too, are data.

I understand the core resistance that filmmakers have to data. It goes deeper than numbers

or math anxiety. It’s another thing to do that feels beside the point, to raise money in support

of, to think about, to be responsible for -- besides shooting and editing and distributing and

promoting the movie. It’s tough -- you want to make feature films -- and audiences, activists

and people with money are asking you about 3 minute viral videos, apps, websites,

installations, marketing campaigns and interactive story worlds. How do you stay true to your

practice as an artist in all this flux? How do you go from telling the stories of poverty,

exploitation, & human rights abuses to exposing hidden and desperately needed solutions?

How do we go from exposing injustice to providing the

pathways for justice?

That artists are tasked to consider the latter activities are part of what defines storytelling in

the age of data. Because the age of data is also the age of participation, the age of the

people formerly known as the audience, the age of circumventing gatekeepers to speak

directly to your friends, fans and followers, the age of crowd funding, of crowd sourcing, the

age of social storytelling at every level. Online and offline. I love how filmmakers are making

real efforts to bring their work in countries and communities where there is little or no

Internet, gathering in unexpected places to share the stories and listen back to the response.

It is important to measure, record and track those efforts over time so we can gain insight

from that work. We know now that not to enable others to evangelize the work, share the

work, buy the work, be inspired by the work and take it, somehow, from their seats to the

  6  

streets - is a recipe for irrelevance, for not having play in the conversations where our stories

must matter and where they are needed most.

Over time, we must ask:

• How many screenings and where,

• how many people and who,

• how many comments,

• how many donations to the cause and when,

• how many new members,

• how many volunteers,

• how many shifts in perception and what kind, and what triggered them,

• how many decisions to change course and what did they mean,

• how many failures and what did we learn?

How do we even know what questions to ask?

Telling the story of the impact of the story is one part of this conversation that needs

attention. The business world has been very busy figuring out what data to track and

developing expensive tools to track it so they can turn people into customers and sell them

more stuff. Data drives successful businesses, period. But how do artists and nonprofits

become more data informed when there are no established, shared indicators for how to

measure the impact of public media? Grameen Foundation has made strides in poverty

alleviation – they developed the PPI, the pro-poverty index, to help pro-poor organizations

know what to measure so they could know when their people were actually moving out of

poverty, or not, when they were becoming customers and why. And they could learn from the

data and replicate it. And take it to scale.

Yes, we need to turn audiences into customers for our films, but how do we also turn them

into changemakers? And how do we know when we do? There are tools now, and I’m sure

you’ll hear a lot about them today, but realistically, there may never be a top ten list of what

to measure and how to know exactly. Be happy about that. Think of it as an opportunity to

  7  

lead and innovate. When you pitch your project to funders, bring this conversation to the

table. Let them know what success will look like for you. Hear about what it looks like for

them. Talk about the importance of your film in that conversation and the opportunities in

front of you. Foundations are doing a lot of work in impact and evaluation right now –

because the reality is that they fund films because they want movement on the issues, they

want to solve pressing social problems, they care about a better world and really helping

communities raise themselves up -- and they see the connections. That’s why we love them.

> We fund American Promise because we want to end the black achievement gap and

create a world without racial bias.

> We fund the Waiting Room because we want health care reform and a national

conversation that reflects the voices of the people.

> We fund the Invisible War because soldiers need to stop being raped by other soldiers.

Talk about impact with your funders and your public at the beginning of your project. It will

instill trust that you are thinking about the change, understand the landscape, and are

working towards some shared goals. Whether its art, journalism, educational content, an

advocacy campaign, if it’s a documentary, a website, an app, a series… If you let

your stakeholders and audiences help you understand the

difference you want to make – you will be free to make the

project you want to make, in the way you want to make it.

And once you start talking about the impact you want to have aspirationally, and how you will

find, track and share your data strategically, new ideas for how to open your story beyond the

screen will start to bubble up, naturally. Then, you can explore those possibilities as a core

part of the narrative, and not as ancillary marketing extras to get people to click on

  8  

meaningless icons after the fact. If we think deeply about how we tell our stories, we create

rituals around them. And this is what is remembered.

Looking further, we have to ask again…what impact are we really having on the audiences

we reach? Tackling these urgent issues requires new models of dynamic collaboration that

facilitate powerful and contextual storytelling. Any meaningful impact metrics on these

projects will come from both artist and activist, filmmaker and NGO partner, creative and

brand. We must understand this moment and this opportunity to leverage the new platforms

for co-creating innovation and open-sourcing social change, or build what we need

ourselves. We are artists. We may not be good at data, yet, but we are good at telling stories

and making things that move people. Our future capacity to action the data all around us --

and I’m talking about both numbers and stories -- will depend on our ability to combine the

metrics with compelling and coherent narratives and to ritualize the communication. We know

our stories must live anywhere the audience lives -- how those stories get told, the structures

that hold both medium and message, and the relationships that rise up from the telling - are

as meaningful as the stories themselves.

The rise of marketing analytics has resulted in information previously not available to an

artistic industry rooted in creativity, not numbers. But how much customer data is too much?

Should we be concerned about creatives overanalyzing data and lose the art of compelling

storytelling? Will dashboards push aside storyboards? Hell no. No chance. Don’t worry

about that. Data, like technology, can facilitate creative discovery and originality – just look at

the work of the Google Creative Lab folks, the investigative data journalists at the Center for

Investigative Reporting who comb open data sets to find breaking news that’s been shrouded

in secrecy, the Fellows at places like Eyebeam and Gray Area inspired by art, algorithms and

human rights – the activists around the world are writing the code that is the soul of the new

machines.

Filmmakers, the pressure is on. Data and impact do go hand in hand. It’s everywhere.

On January 24 PopTech published their Made to Measure web edition called The New

Science of Impact. It’s worth reading. Andrew Zolli’s article, the Mismeasure of Impact gave

me pause:

  9  

“Data scientists and information economists in particular are beginning to pair with social innovators to understand the dynamics of interventions, and separating what works from what doesn’t. How often has some version of this story happened: A group of young, eager innovators come together to develop a new, promising approach to one of today’s “wicked problems” – in an area like climate change, poverty alleviation, food security, or off-grid energy. With a mix of design and engineering prowess, good intentions and no small amount of luck, they develop a laudable prototype. This wins them breathless media attention, speaking invitations to conferences and perhaps a prize or two, followed by sufficient seed capital for a pilot. The pilot shows promise; after the intervention,the relevant critical indicator (which might be a measure of market access, public health, etc.) shows marked improvement. On the strength of this happy outcome, more capital is raised. The intervention moves out of the pilot stage and is rolled out to the community. The press is breathless. Hopes are high. And then, much to everyone’s chagrin: almost nothing changes. The new social innovation barely makes a dent in the problem, which appears more pernicious than ever. What happened?”

He talks about how many of the most promising new approaches to tough problems fail, in

ways that surprise and frustrate their creators, funders and constituents alike.

The reasons behind such failures are complex. The most common is a kind of cultural

blindness on the part of would be change-agents – worth reading to hear more about this. It’s

actually a call for human-centered design. For example, let’s say you develop an innovative

literacy-improving program for children. You test a community of low-literacy subjects, then

provide the intervention, and test them again. Their measured rates of literacy jump

dramatically. Time to pop the champagne corks, right? Wait a moment. Why exactly did rates

of literacy improve? Was it your program? Or was it a natural byproduct of the maturation of

the subjects? Or was it a practice effect of the test? We tend to do better on tasks we’ve tried

before. It might be the case that subjects simply got better because they’d seen this kind of

test before.

After running through each type of mistake that can and is often made, it would seem for

artists, time to walk away from the whole thing. Leave it to the NGOs to figure out data

strategy and best practice. Bad idea. Zolli notes that social science and fields like medical

research, like big business, are replete with tools for designing effective impact

  10  

measurement. Data scientists and information economists in particular are beginning to pair

with social innovators to understand the dynamics of interventions, and separate what works

from what doesn’t. Technologists are uncovering new ways to aggregate core impact data

and make it open. Yet this work has little bearing on the kind of impact statements demanded

by many funders today. Many arts funders have never looked at impact this way.

Zolli concludes with saying that what we need now is a revolution in both the practice and

culture of innovation, one that recognizes that meaningful measurement is every bit as

essential – and artful – as the interventions themselves, and bakes it in as a core component

of the work. Otherwise, we may very well be wasting everyone’s time. I’ve been doing some

exciting work with the Sundance Institute and Skoll Foundation’s Stories of Change program,

where we tell social entrepreneurs to bake in storytelling as a core component of their

innovation work. A lot of baking going on – dna restructuring – the journey from raw to

cooked. And we’re back to the roots of structural anthropology. The basic idea from Claude

Levi -Strauss is that myths cannot be understood in isolation, but only as parts of an entire

myth system. A structural analysis of a myth system involves elucidating the shared features

of different myths and the transformations which link them. It is these relationships and

transformations between myths that are important, not just the details of individual myths; it is

the systems of these that are significant in the context of the broader culture. This is a call for

open, linked data in the cloud, accessible to all -- most significant in a culture of networked

collaboration.

It is time to think about data and public media more holistically.

In the January 13 edition of Forbes Magazine I read,

“the next generation is leveraging data assets with agility and prescience. Staying relevant requires that we constantly listen to, learn from and optimize the data at our fingertips. 2013 is before us, asking the ultimate question: Will we join the data dinosaurs of yesteryear or will we resolve to adopt the data-driven culture of the future?”

I’ll push back just a little on that the notion of “data–driven” -- the way I pushed back on

“technology-driven” about 5 years ago. Chasing technology is the ultimate drag on creativity

  11  

and we should not do it. What drives a culture should be a coherence of stories, soul and

conscience. And I do believe that elegant technology can facilitate that. I prefer “data-

informed.” It assumes people are gaining insight from the data they generate, and not

running around being chased by the data monster.

The renowned Sandy Pentland at MIT (recently named one of the `seven most powerful data

scientists in the world by Forbes, along with the Google founders and the CTO of the United

States of America), talks about the New Deal on Data, which I kind of like. It’s like a

consumer’s Bill of Rights, and he talks about how leveraging personal data respectfully, and

designing products and services that offer really personal recommendations, can enable

what he calls “human physics” to be understood at a fine-grained level, which offers amazing

cultural possibilities beyond commerce and industry. In business, Big Data offers the

opportunity to build connections with people and identify connections among people,

behaviors, and outcomes. But if you are doing that, Pentland says, never forget to be

transparent with customers on what information is collected – and offer options for how any

such data are used. Giving customers a sense of control and ownership in exchange for what

they’ve shared will go a long way toward building trust. Now think about this for a minute in a

different context. Giving artists, subjects and audiences a sense of control and ownership in

exchange for what they’ve shared will also go a long way toward building trust.

Interesting. This is what we’ve been talking about when we talk about story. It’s like the bricks

and mortar of documentary ethics. These days, audiences become artists in participatory and

curated environments, and they need a point of entry into a story so they can tell it. It’s a two-

way conversation that quickly spreads to many. So that means collaborative data and

participatory storytelling comprise the same impulse.

If the community we are creating for doesn’t have access to fast internet or any internet or

most of the social technologies, we make interactive story projects more simply - with sms, a

still image, words on a page, a mural, a co-created diary, a piece of paper and a crayon, an

abandoned building, a megaphone -- the possibilities are endless. We can collect data on

legal pads. But, if you do have online access and you are thinking about technology,

remember that your stories are also your data, and your impact is not only in the numbers,

  12  

but also, and maybe mostly, in the interconnections. If art and advocacy are to work together,

we must be committed to the collaboration.

Fllmmakers and technologists have been figuring out this tough collaboration for years. Tech

geeks throw together killer code over coffee & beer-filled hacker weekends and actually build

tools that attempt to kick the shit out of wicked social problems, they release new code while

its still funky and other geeks tweak it and the original coder is praised. Serious filmmakers,

on the other hand, navigate the slow development of a production process where it can take

months to finesse a 10 minute reel that is visually breathtaking, thematically nuanced, speaks

truth to power and moves people beyond measure. You don’t release a clunky sequence that

doesn’t work, - you wait till it’s right. The technologists enable the vision, and the

documentary filmmakers provide a new context for their work that feels good. Data mining

can be the same – but the collaboration is wider and even more challenging. You can’t pull

numbers out of thin air. They need context, wisdom, framing, reliability. Artists, activists,

policy wonks, and data scientists should get together with designers & developers in some

combination and figure these things out, and share the findings with the world. It must start

with a willingness to admit that the real impact cannot be achieved alone, it must reflect

dynamic reciprocal partnerships, and the openness to share results with some level of

transparency. With Sparkwise, as soon as we raise our next funding round, we are planning

to walk this talk in version two with some new collaboration tools that turn the platform into a

vibrant open data community with its own creative lab. I’m very excited about this – and the

idea that more filmmakers can join with more communities in more effective ways.

In just the past year, we have seen the beginnings of an important evolution: As Dan Green

has noted in his Skoll blog, many media organizations are moving from a largely agnostic

relationship to their role in social change to openly discussing, pursuing, and even attempting

to track their impact on the issues they address. Take Pro Publica. An organization of some

of the most kickass journalists in this country. Their mission statement says they seek to

stimulate positive change. And their president has said publicly to journalists that “If you

reveal an injustice, you should want, if possible, to show how that injustice might be

remedied, and to use the means at your disposal to see that it is.”

  13  

And take the New York Times. Green also notes that Aron Pilhofer, the Times Interactive

Editor, placed a Mozilla-Knight fellow inside the newsroom to help measure impact. That’s

huge. It’s the first time such a person will work inside the newsroom, rather than in the sales

department. And just as we watched interactive digital content over the last five years move

from marketing into program, so too, is data is moving to the center of public media

operations.

Pilhofer notes:

…the benchmarks we use now are so ill suited. They are the simplistic, one-dimensional metrics we all know: pageviews, time on site, uniques. We use them largely because they are there and because they are easy — even though we all know they’re a lousy way to measure impact. The metrics newsrooms have traditionally used tended to be fairly imprecise: Did a law change? Did the bad guy go to jail? Were dangers revealed? Were lives saved? Or least significant of all, did it win an award?

The problem now is figuring out which data to pay attention to and which to ignore. The idea

that we are closer to finding the right metrics for news is exciting. Ideally, a newsroom or

public media enterprise would have an integrated database connecting the stories to both

quantitative and qualitative indicators of impact: notes on what happened after the story was

published, plus automatically collected analytics, comments, links, social media trending, and

other indicators. With that sort of extensive data set, we are closer to being able to figure out

not only what the story did, but how best to evaluate it. Like almost every newsroom, every

public media producer should have some sort of content analytics, and qualitative effects can

be tracked even with just notes in a basic spreadsheet...Xls files can be visualized

dynamically & easily with a range of tools, including but certainly not limited to Sparkwise.

In a very smart post on metrics and civic impact last year, Ethan Zuckerman wrote,

”measuring how many people read a story is something any web administrator should be

able to do. Audience doesn’t necessarily equal impact.” Not only that, but it might not always

be the case that a larger audience is better. For some stories, getting them in front

of particular people at particular times might be more important. Filmmakers deeply

understand this notion of core audience, and that small and specific can hold power, just as

10 million views can bring a video story into the culture like little else. Small data can be as

useful as big data.

  14  

There are a a number of projects out in the world recently – the next gen of storymakers and

film producers – that have been incorporating data strategies and partnerships– and forging

new opportunities for impact along the way. It takes a little bit of science, a modicum of

creativity and a commitment to being the change we want to see.

Take a look at the Revolutionary Optimists - This is a documentary about kids in the slums of

Kolkata who, in the face of extreme poverty, become community health activists armed with

megaphones, puppets, and mobile devices. When filmmakers Maren Grainger Monsen and

Nicole Newnham were mid-production on the film, they made a number of choices: the

website for the project would not just be a brochure for the movie where engagement is

defined as attending a screening or limited to a Facebook post. Map Your World is a

community data and story network that uses the activities of the kids as the core narrative

and structure. The change they are making on the ground is deepened and amplified with

new tools and program resources developed by the filmmakers, for the NGO doing the work

in community. Kids doing health surveys using a filmmaker-designed global data & story

mapping platform has resulted in a 70% reduction in polio infection in their community. The

film has brought international attention to the project and the young people – they’ve been

invited to speak at the Skoll World Forum, the UN, the Gates Foundation. The filmmakers

extended the boundaries of their storytelling way beyond the big screen. The impact of this

project must be mined, tracked and reported in a coherent data story that integrates the film

metrics, NGO data, and environmental impact – the kids also do work on drinkable water

sources and garbage collection. This is call for open relationships between filmmakers and

partners – data sharing and data privacy must be reckoned with. But open data for social

good needs be a shared goal.

Another project with a compelling new relationship to data and impact is the film When I

Walk, Jason da Silva’s remarkable story of his life dealing with Multiple Sclerosis. Wanting to

have an impact beyond his own narrative, he set about building AXS Map, a browser

extension and mobile app that gives New Yorkers real information on accessibility, stories

from wheelchair users, accessibility reviews of businesses, and an augmented reality layer

that allows folks to hold up their phones wherever they are and find accessible places in their

  15  

neighborhood. This app launched with the film and is mining the data of a local community

and will be making it available for other communities across the country to build out their own

local apps.

We have a ways to go in our field in terms of measurement impact and accountability.

Agreement on strategies for defining indicators of impact is big. Engagement campaigns that

truly engage is also big – when it comes time for your next grant applications, a campaign

without a data strategy is like the sound of a tree falling in the proverbial empty forest.

Hugh Hart wrote a piece for Fast Company Co.Create recently about how documentaries

galvanize causes online and go beyond the confines of the theater by creating “Do

Something About It” companion campaigns. He notes:

Movie: How To Survive a Plague

Issue: AIDS awareness.

Action plan: LEARN more FIGHT for health care justice LOVE connect with engaged

communities

The film’s GET INVOLVED section enables people to create or join a "meet-up" inspired by

the ACT UP gatherings that historically raised awareness about AIDS. Curated list of

Organizations We Love is great – but who is taking responsibility for the data generated - of

how many folks were pushed to those organizations because their hearts were ripped open

by the film, what did they do, how did things change as a result? We can’t know what works if

we don’t track the activity and correlated the data.

Movie: Bully

Issue: Bullying.

Action plan: Think local.

The Bully Project outlines an eight-point program that includes a "Pledge" for school

principals to discourage bullies. The site also provides a downloadable Action Guide, urges

visitors to post advice about how to deal with bullies on the movie’s Facebook page, and

solicits stories from "upstanders" who intervene when they see kids getting bullied.

  16  

Movie: Detropia

Issue: Urban decay.

Action plan: links to Soup kitchens, rappers, and salons.

Hewing to the film’s grassroots perspective, Detropia's proselytizes on behalf of the city by

celebrating Detroit revitalizers, including the Raizup rap group, the weekly "Culturenomics"

salon, and the Capuchin Soup Kitchen.

Problem is there’s zero data available, except for the twitter and facebook widgets. For all we

know, those could be well-meaning but dead pages on those filmsites taking up space on the

internet. Or there could be real change happening and we’d never know about or be able to

be inspired by it – until the case study was published a year or two later.

Ultimately, I’m making a call for integrating data into the project of storytelling – on all levels.

Yes counting clicks can sometimes be important, if the clicks are connected to something

meaningful. Data storytelling does not mean charts and graphs and tables and widgets on

screen. It means realizing that for us here in the US, the web is open and semantic, and

narrative content must be available for search, and taken into account when assessing

impact. It means the output of our stories creates a loop of cultural exchange – taking

responsibility for curating and sharing the stories and data of your subjects and your

audience can be profoundly transformative and those metrics can have meaning when trying

to assess which activities hit the culture with the force of change.

As you travel through the conference talk to Paco and Pam about how they think about

measurement – their last project Granito and their new project Disruption have a

groundbreaking relationship to data. Check out BizVizz in the app store – a corporate

accountability mobile app that visualizes data about the brands we buy. It was created by

Brad Lichtenstein, the director of the PBS doc As Goes Janesville – and they hit 11,000

downloads in the equivalent of opening weekend. In the firehose of the app store, that’s

some traction.

And there are the storytellers who don’t make traditional broadcast content, but who leverage

data and stories for tremendous results:

  17  

DIGITAL DEMOCRACY: They have recently enabled residents of the Peruvian Amazon to

document the effects of mining and oil drilling by creating a mobile tool kit they can use to

collect and share data.

WITNESS, one of the best organizations known to humankind, in partnership with the

Guardian project, is helping journalists and newsrooms authenticate the deluge of photos

and videos emerging from news events with a new app that automatically stamps the content

with identifying information, including the location where it was taken. This is data and

storytelling on steroids, creating a living data story archive that is our global culture., that is

the information that can be mined for innovation, for serving those at risk.

This is the next wave of the new documentary movement, a posse of artists willing to be

accountable to a practice that considers stories as cultural data and a pathway to large scale

action where its necessary. Kristin Capps wrote recently in a very powerful piece about the

role of art in the wake of tragedy in the Washington CityPaper. She writes, “There is no

reason that art has to play a narrow part in the impossible project of figuring out what

happened.” And for me, there is no reason that art has to play a narrow part in unpacking

how to understand and how to overcome a social paralysis that threatens our future.

This is the time to seize the moment – if you take public money to make art, give back the

data you create to the public. Understand that this could be the key to unlocking new ways of

thinking and living and being together. It’s the key to marginalized communities rising up, the

key to the education of girls locked in silence, the key to our work mattering enough so that

the defunding art is like defunding life.

End