Telling Dazzling Stories from Data

Rebeca Pop’s mission is to help her students become amazing storytellers.

However, the students she teaches are not in the English or journalism programs at Northwestern University. Rather, Pop teaches the new data visualization course in Northwestern Engineering's Master of Science in Information Technology (MSIT) program. 

Her job is to help students become expert storytellers using the wealth of data they will have at their fingertips throughout their careers. The goal? Molding professionals who will use data to show, not tell, the stories being revealed by the numbers. 

“Data visualization and data storytelling are like siblings,” said Pop, who, in addition to her teaching duties, is the founder of Vizlogue, a data visualization and data storytelling lab that provides workshops and consulting services. “They grew up together, and they need each other.” 

At its most basic form, data visualization involves taking raw data and turning it into a story the target audience can understand simply by looking at the graphs and visuals. Yes, Pop said, there are times when it’s necessary to share numbers in an Excel table, but in most instances, the message the numbers are trying to communicate is better delivered in a more visually appealing format.  

But becoming a visual storyteller is about more than just leveraging templates from a spreadsheet. 

“A graph in itself has to tell a story. We have to take our skills beyond just clicking on a template in a tool like Excel, PowerBI, or Tableau and letting the tool do the work for us,” she said. “The tool will never know what the business question that we're trying to answer is.”  

That is just some of what Pop conveys to her students in her data visualization class. Those lessons continue to evolve as she advances in her career.  

Pop started her business, Vizlogue, in 2020 due primarily to pandemic-induced boredom. In one moment, she realized she had a wealth of knowledge from her decade-long career turning data into attention-grabbing visuals; in the next, she was buying a domain, creating a website, and posting on social media that she was accepting clients.  

“Fast-forward to 2023, and we've delivered dozens of workshops to companies and organizations and trained over 3,000 participants on how to communicate with data using data visualization and data storytelling,” she said.  

Pop’s MSIT class took students on a journey beyond the tools that make graphs to the skills that make data easier to understand. She focuses on storytelling techniques, data literacy, and design skills to help students understand how people best take in data.  

She said she likes to keep her class interactive, engaging, and extremely hands-on. The mission is to create MSIT graduates who can catch their audience’s attention with their visuals during professional presentations.  

“If someone asks my students to create a graph, that graph should be received with reactions such as, ‘That is a really interesting angle,’ or ‘This is so clear now,’” she said. “I don't want them to ever be in a position where the audience is confused and says something along the lines of ‘I'm not sure what this means.’”  

Pop was impressed with the caliber of the students in her first MSIT class this spring. She hopes they feel she is meeting their enthusiasm with her own.  

“I'm very passionate about data visualization and data storytelling, and I think this is apparent when I teach,” she said. “I love working with MSIT students. They are bright, dedicated, and very interested in expanding their skill set.”