Turning statistics into knowledge
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Contents |
Overview
Summary Report on the Seminar on “Innovative Approaches to Turning Statistics into Knowledge” Cape Town, 8-10 December 2010
The 4th international seminar on “Innovative Approaches to Turn Statistics into Knowledge” was held in Cape Town and co-hosted by Statistics South Africa, OECD and the World Bank. This event was the first of the series to be held in Africa and follows the previous seminars held Rome (2007), Stockholm (2008) and Washington DC (2009). The seminar are part of the OECD Global Project on Measuring the Progress of Societies and a key objective of this project is to develop indicators in a wide range of policy areas that allow assessment of economic performance, people’s well-being and sustainability.
The visualisation tools showcased in the seminar are key to the dissemination of these new indicators and can help ensure that the data we produce are used and contribute to enhance the knowledge of people. A major goal of the seminar is to promote solutions for making data easily available to decision makers and the public for evidence-based decisions contributing towards a stronger, cleaner, fairer world economy, which is the mission of the OECD and is especially important during the year we are celebrating the OECD’s 50th anniversary under the motto “better policies for better lives”.
The Cape Town seminar continued to develop and build on the themes covered in the Rome, Stockholm and DC events and featured a wide range of presentations from Africa, Europe, North America, Asia and Australia that covered “storytelling”, the use of maps in understanding data , data discovery & analysis software and other visualisation techniques. Participating presenters came from a mix of backgrounds: Statistical Offices, International Organisations, Research bodies and Private companies.
Themes
The meeting was organized around 4 main themes for the presentations that covered the following topics:
- Using Maps to visualize your data - software making use of maps to select and visualize the data.
- How to get the most out of your data with Discovery & Analysis software – using ‘data mining’ together with other analytical software to exploit statistical data
- Using data and storytelling to get a message across - the ability of the tool to describe a sequence of events using the data, graphics and descriptive text saved and viewed as a ‘story’ that can be shared with others.
- Visualising data in innovative ways - viewing data and graphics in a way not covered by the other themes. In addition there was a session of presentations by young African statisticians on a variety of subjects.
The seminar also included a showing of the BBC film “The Joy of Stats” which featured Hans Rosling describing statistical visualisation methods of the past 200 years as well as today’s cutting-edge tools and which fitted perfectly into the seminar’s programme.
There were some 30 presentations in total. See here for the agenda which includes links. A video of the whole event will be made available on the website.
Main Conclusions of the Seminar
- The innovative use of graphical and mapping software for ‘storytelling’ continues to evolve, in particular in the domain of allowing users to create and visualise data, particularly when they are made available in machine readable “open” formats by producers.
- The messages of the seminar reinforced those of the BBC film ‘The Joy of Stats’ that data should be made available to a wider audience together with tools that allow them to better understand the world they live in and to make their decisions accordingly.
- Good stories require good narrators. Storytelling software alone is not enough – the challenge is to find the experts who can communicate their stories in a compelling way.
- The trend for organizations to join forces and share software and ideas for data visualization is continuing.
Papers and presentations from the Seminar
See the programme for links to all papers and presentations from the seminar.
Background on Previous Seminars
The first seminar in Rome (“Dynamic Graphics for Presenting Statistical Indicators”) focused on importance of presenting key societal phenomena to modern audiences in an interesting and understandable way. The goal in Rome was to gather the developers of leading-edge products to showcase their solutions and identify good practices allowing organisations to advance further in this field. The second seminar was hosted by Statistics Sweden in Stockholm. It showed the evolution in this area by moving from Dynamic Graphics software towards the use of videos, participative “Web 2.0” and “story-telling” applications. The third seminar of the series was held in Washington DC in 2009. The presentations in DC demonstrated new and ground-breaking visualisation tools that crossed the barrier into visual arts.
