VizChitra 2025: India's first community-driven Data Visualization conference

This simple 100,000-year-old tool is arguably one of the most misunderstood and overused words in human history. From cave walls to charts on dashboards, storytelling has taken on many shapes and meanings. Over time, people have tried to define stories through different narrative structures, especially in films and epics. But with each new context, the meaning of a story shifts and becomes more layered and nuanced.

The VizChitra community brings together practitioners from design, tech and journalism, which means we have a mixed bag of perspectives on storytelling. At the heart of data visualisation is how people perceive the data, and storytelling plays a big role in shaping that perception. This session is a conversation where we’ll surface the different storytelling techniques used by data wizards from varied backgrounds and draw parallels with some well-known narrative structures. It’s about learning from each other and connecting the dots between data, design and good old-fashioned storytelling.

Takeaways

• Understand established narrative structures
• Discover and share storytelling techniques that have worked specifically in data visualisation

Audience

• Folks who can find insights in data but want more engaging ways to present it
• Anyone trying to make their content easier for others to understand and act on

I’m Vivek Raju, story consultant at Kathasys. I run workshops for startups to help them find and tell their stories better. This year, I published a research paper exploring the parallels between story structure and the design process. In this BoF session, I’d love to explore something similar between data visualisation and storytelling.