Overview

“Persuading with Data” is a crucial literacy domain for helping students learn how to generate persuasive data-driven content to assist advocacy aims for diverse contexts, purposes, and audiences.

Persuading with Data is a multi-modal affair, meaning that when it comes to data advocacy, not only does data often come in various forms (numerical, imagistic, geolocational) but data is also commonly woven together with various resources for communication (words, sounds, images, etc.) to achieve various aims. To help students learn the various multi-modal ways one can persuade with data for advocacy purposes, we offer resources that specifically focus on: making claims with data; visualizing data; mapping data; and telling stories with data.

The resources offered under this literacy domain focus on these and other important questions:

How can rhetoric—the art of persuasion—inform and enhance our data advocacy efforts?
How can we use data to make emotional, ethical, and logical appeals to help achieve our advocacy aims?
How can data visualizations and maps be responsibly used to assist our advocacy efforts?
How can we tell ethical, effective, and affective data-driven stories to achieve our various rhetorical aims?

Making Claims with Data

Resources for this literacy domain introduce students to the art of rhetoric and teach students how to identify a rhetorical situation, make ethical and persuasive claims with data, and move a targeted audience through logical, emotional, and ethical appeals.

Sample Toolkit Resources

Evaluating Statistical Claims

Resource Type: Slides

This slide deck, which can be used as a reading or an activity, briefly introduces nine questions to ask when evaluating the validity of a statistical claim. It then provides a series of statistical claims for students to evaluate and ends by asking students to apply this same type of evaluation to a statistical claim from their own project.

Framing Statistics

Resource Type: Slides

This slide deck, which can be used as a reading or an activity, introduces students to the rhetorical framework of framing theory and explores how this framework can be applied to study and generate statistics and statistical claims.

Rhetorical Numbers: Quantitative Argument Across the Curriculum

Resource Type: Reading

In this recorded lecture with slide presentation, Joanna Wolfe calls for a rhetorical education that combines verbal and mathematical literacies to help students better understand how numbers are used in the service of argument at public, professional, and personal levels.

The Many Ways to Write a Statistic

Resource Type: Activity

This 30-45 minute in-class activity invites students to explore big rhetorical differences that can result from small changes in phrasing when statistical claims are relayed in words.

Visualizing Data

Resources for this literacy domain teach students how to analyze and generate data visualizations with potential for moving an audience in service of one’s advocacy aims.

Sample Toolkit Resources

Create an Original Data Visualization

Resource Type: Assignment

This assignment sequence asks students to sketch, draft, workshop, and revise an original data visualization using data they find themselves online.

Critique of the Longline Fishing Infographic

Resource Type: Lesson Plan

This lesson plan offers instructions for a 20-30 minute activity in which students are challenged to rhetorically analyze a Greenpeace infographic about longline fishing. The ultimate goal of the activity is to give students practice aligning visuals with rhetorical purposes.

Introduction to Data Visualization (videos)

Resource Type: Reading

In 25 minutes of total runtime, these two videos provide a concise in-depth introduction to the rhetorical principles of data visualization. The first video summarizes the history of persuasive visualizations with three key examples from the 19th century by John Snow, Florence Nightingale, and W.E.B. DuBois. The second video lays out six key principles of data visualization and explains what can go wrong when these principles are violated.

Mapping Data

Resources for this literacy domain teach students how to analyze and generate data driven maps with potential for moving an audience in service of one’s advocacy aims.

Sample Toolkit Resources

Deconstructing a Published Map

Resource Type: Assignment

This assignment invites students to find a map that represents information about a social issue that they are interested in, deconstruct how that map “works” from a rhetorical and data-advocacy perspective, and explore how it might be used as part of a broader data-based advocacy campaign.

Map Design and Critical Cartography

Resource Type: Lesson Plan

This lesson plan introduces students to map design as a practice of visual rhetoric and critical cartography. Students comes to learn that while maps function as social and political technologies that can be used as agents of control or domination, maps can also be reconfigured as tools of emancipation or social change.

Mapping Broadband Health in America

Resource Type: Example Project

Mapping Broadband Health in America 2023, is a useful example of how data advocacy is often used in the field of public health. This project enables users to visualize, intersect, and analyze broadband and health data at the national, state and county levels – informing policy and program prescriptions, future innovations, and investment decisions.

Telling Stories with Data

Resources for this literacy domain teach students how to integrate claims, visualizations, and maps with narrative to generate powerful multi-modal stories in various genres for data advocacy purposes.

Sample Toolkit Resources

Data Advocacy Op-Ed

Resource Type: Assignment

This assignment is designed to help hone students' abilities to persuade with data by challenging them to craft a multi-modal argument in the genre of an op-ed.

Data Storytelling: How to Effectively Tell a Story with Data

Resource Type: Reading

In this article, Catherine Cote invokes recent research psychology to show that, in most cases, human brains are wired to prefer making meaning out of stories rather than raw data. Emphasizing organizational communication and business contexts, the article offers a useful, quasi-literary framework for doing data storytelling that adopts concepts such as setting, character, and conflict.

Telling Counter-Stories with Data

Resource Type: Activity

This activity prompts students to search the internet for data points about STEM education in the US, and to then develop a counter-story in response to Malcom Gladwell’s narrative that low success rates among prospective STEM majors is a psychologically inevitable outcome.