The Epistemological Basis for Constructing Data-Driven Narratives.

A narrative is a storytelling technique that may be a practical and effective means of sharing knowledge within a community of interest. Narratives are philosophically aligned to both the case study and the grounded theory methods in that they allow a deep and focused analysis of a subject of interest and then using induction to draw support from data-driven, evidence-based reasoning. The typical sequence of narrative construction comprises three distinct phases: 1) identifying a purpose and an audience; 2) selecting observation or data points and analytic techniques such as visualization, modelling or benchmarking, from which to extract valuable knowledge or wisdom to share; 3) developing key messages incorporating good practices and lessons learnt, or re-constructing the narrative with new data or purpose.