New course has science writers exploring the art of sourcing, analyzing, and verifying data and incorporating this information with their narrative skills to deliver factual, data-driven stories about science, medicine, and technology.
In a world saturated with information, a newly designed course instructs science writing students how to distill truth in data, interpret its meaning, and tell compelling stories that drive meaningful understanding.
Storytelling with Data, which launches as an elective course in the MA in Science Writing program in Fall 2025, has students exploring the art of sourcing, analyzing, and verifying data and incorporating this information with their narrative skills to deliver factual, data-driven stories about science, medicine, and technology. The course engages students in discussions about biases that may be buried in data, the influence that data has on our lives, the channels of mis-and disinformation and propaganda, and the unique ways that data storytelling can enhance reader engagement.
“Data contains innumerable stories waiting to be told,” said Program Director Melissa Hendricks who oversees one of the largest graduate science writing programs in the country. “For most of us, seeing a bunch of data doesn’t mean anything. This course enables the science writer to take the data, discover what stories it might contain, and then reveal those stories in both texts and visualizations through graphs and charts. It has them looking critically at the data to determine its reliability. Is the data complete? Does it contain biases? Has the data been manipulated to show untruths?”
Course instructor Bill Gourgey will introduce students to various tools for locating and cleaning data and cogently presenting data-driven stories that bring to light what is happening in the world – everything from global temperature trends to rates of gun violence geographically to nutritional changes over the years. The course will explore how to uncover systemic inequities hidden in seemingly neutral statistics and charts, reveal environmental trends that can drive meaningful policy changes, expose economic disparities that challenge assumptions, and translate complex global challenges into actionable narratives.
“We live in a world that is increasingly inundated with data and artificial intelligence,” Gourgey said. “The ability to navigate that world capably is a life skill that is necessary to being a good technological citizen. Being able to understand data and not be intimidated by it, to be able to understand where it is coming from, what constitutes good data versus bad or incomplete data, are essential skills for journalists.”
Students will move through the course in four distinct sections. The first section, foundations of data storytelling, will draw students out of their comfort zones and into sizeable datasets and spreadsheets. After defining what good data is, the students will find data, clean it up, and identify trends using common software like Google Sheets or Microsoft Excel.
From there, students will move into an exploration of data visualization, learning how to create maps, charts, and scatter plots that will help them analyze the data and locate hidden trends.
The third and longest segment of the course will be the storytelling component, when the students go out and get their own data set, do their own manipulations, create their own visualizations, and create an accompanying narrative that is supported and augmented by the data they have researched.
The course will conclude with a discussion on the topics of ethics and trust in data.
“The whole premise of the class is to find the human side of the data and tell that story,” Gourgey said. “What does it mean to society and individuals? The data is just one part of the story. What is the science writer’s responsibility to extract data by not inadvertently or deliberately misleading people? How are you deciphering bias in the data, for instance, by considering how the statistical sample was obtained or who comprised the participant group? It is very easy to manipulate data to make it say what you want it to say. It happens all the time. Students will continue to do the usual commensurate reporting by interviewing experts to corroborate the data and their findings. At the end, they will have a high-quality story that they can pitch for publication.”
“We truly believe that data literacy is a form of social empowerment,” Hendricks said. “The goal of the course is to train our science writers to see beyond the numbers to identify and relay the human stories they represent.”