Lately, as I’ve been thinking about ways to provide more context for assessment reports, I’ve been experimenting with adding narrative to my data-visualizations. This experimentation partly recognizes that the primary audience for data-visualizations I create appreciate narrative more than numbers. It also recognizes that narrative with visuals is just more engaging and fun to read.

For some visualizations, I include broad, philosophical questions with an explanation of the data, its origins, and why it may be useful for librarians to consider:

For others, the questions are much more specific:

Right now, this experimentation is quite preliminary. I have no idea whether the audience for these visualizations will find the added narrative useful.  I do believe, however, that visualization + narrative is something worth exploring.