Telling Stories with Data

Chapman and Hall/CRC published this book in July 2023. You can purchase that here.

This online version has some updates to what was printed. An online version that matches the print version is available here.

Endorsements

This clean and fun book covers a wide range of topics on statistical communication, programming, and modeling in a way that should be a useful supplement to any statistics course or self-learning program. I absolutely love this book!

Andrew Gelman , Columbia University, and author of Regression and Other Stories

An excellent book. Communication and reproducibility are of increasing concern in statistics, and this book covers these topics and more in a practical, appealing, and truly unique way.

Daniela Witten , University of Washington, and author of An Introduction to Statistical Learning

Many data science texts tell you how to perform perfunctory calculations. Instead, Telling Stories with Data tells you how to engage in the mindset and process of analysis. By arming students with the computational, statistical and philosophical skills needed to use data in sense-making and story-telling, this book stands out from the pack as uniquely actionable and empowering.

Emily Riederer , Capital One, and author of R Markdown Cookbook

Telling Stories with Data is a thoughtful guide to using data to learn and affect positive change. The book includes each stage of the process and can serve as a long-lasting companion to many data scientists and future data story tellers.

Christopher Peters , Zapier

This is not another statistics book. It is much better than that. It is a book about doing quantitative research, about scientific justification, about quality control, about communication and epistemic humility. It’s a valuable supplement to any methods curriculum, and useful for self-learners as well.

Richard McElreath , Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, and author of Statistical Rethinking

A clever career choice is to pick a field where your skills are complementary with a growing resource. In the coming decades, those who are adept in analysing data will flourish. That means crunching statistics and telling compelling stories. Rohan Alexander’s book will help you do both.

Andrew Leigh , Member of the Australian Parliament, and author of Randomistas: How Radical Researchers Are Changing Our World

Every data analyst has to tell stories with data, and yet traditional textbooks focus on statistical methods alone. Telling Stories with Data teaches the entire data science workflow, including data acquisition, communication, and reproducibility. I highly recommend this unique book!

Kosuke Imai , Harvard University, and author of Quantitative Social Science: An Introduction

This is an extraordinary, wonderful, book, full of wise advice for anyone starting in data science. Intermixing concepts and code means the ideas are immediately made concrete, and the emphasis on reproducible workflows brings a welcome dose of rigor to a rapidly developing field.

Sir David Spiegelhalter , University of Cambridge, and author of The Art of Statistics

Telling (true) Stories with Data requires more than fancy statistical models and big data. With a series of fascinating case studies, Rohan Alexander teaches us how to ask good questions, acquire data, estimate models, and communicate our results. This holistic approach is explained with crisp and engaging prose. The pages are filled with detailed R examples, which emphasize the importance of transparency and reproducibility. I absolutely love this book and recommend it to all my students.

Vincent Arel-Bundock , Université de Montréal, and author of Analyse Causale et Méthodes Quantitatives

Preface

This book will help you tell stories with data. It establishes a foundation on which you can build and share knowledge about an aspect of the world that interests you based on data that you observe. Telling stories in small groups around a fire played a critical role in the development of humans and society (Wiessner 2014). Today our stories, based on data, can influence millions.

In this book we will explore, prod, push, manipulate, knead, and ultimately, try to understand the implications of, data. A variety of features drive the choices in this book.

The motto of the university from which I took my PhD is naturam primum cognoscere rerum or roughly “first to learn the nature of things”. But the original quote continues temporis aeterni quoniam, or roughly “for eternal time”. We will do both of these things. I focus on tools, approaches, and workflows that enable you to establish lasting and reproducible knowledge.

When I talk of data in this book, it will typically be related to humans. Humans will be at the center of most of our stories, and we will tell social, cultural, and economic stories. In particular, throughout this book I will draw attention to inequity both in social phenomena and in data. Most data...