Good morning TAFFY!I wanted to start this conversation in the new year as a response to some of the book recommendations made in our TAFFY call from December, and to see whether or not we could start building a "recommended reading list" or "book club" approach around topics related to both analytics and Analytics.I started out my own 2020 by digging into Blah Blah Blah: What to Do When Words Don't Work by Dan Roam, which came recommended by Erin Koppel (Past Staff Member) in our last meeting.As a lifelong recovering English major (Creative Writing concentration, even!), words have always been my go-to and my crutch, that place in communication where I feel most comfortable, and you can bet that putting it in writing has always taken precedence to talking it out.My (still very recent) shift to data-based fundraising (and subsequently data-based everything in my role as Consortium Manager) has challenged me to embrace not only numbers (which consistently terrified me through all levels of education) but also visualizations of data and how to artistically depict what's important (also terrifying to my creative mind which puts more credence in my ability to describe than to draw).Reading Blah Blah Blah was the perfect way to start a new year for me because it simultaneously helped with consoling me that it is okay to work in the words/verbal area of my mind, but also learning that the images/visual area needs to work in concert in order to help improve my skills as a communicator. The book also provides a tool called "The Vivid Grammar Graph" which is a great shorthand for what kinds of words/information could/should be depicted in specific visualizations, which has helped to re-center and re-focus my approach even to just the various visualizations available in Tessitura Analytics.Now I turn to you, TAFFY community: what books would you recommend to people here? I'm looking forward to expanding my 2020 reading list!Thank you,Brian
Thanks for the candid share Brian. I forgot about that and will pick it up. Ive mentioned to Erin and Amalia that they should start a book club at TLCC This is a great idea
I'm super interested in Madeline Dummerth (Past Member) new data visualisation tome that she got over the holidays. Hope we get a review
I was reading 'Good Charts' (recommended by on the last call) over the holiday. It was a great read. It was a little repetitive but didn't feel like it went too far. I appreciated that the author broke the book up visually too. I'm now onto Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic's 'Storytelling With Data.' It's taken me a lot longer to get through this book (partially because it's dry and partially because I've been on a fiction kick lately) but I've learned a good amount from her! I've started putting into practice some of what I've learned and I'm looking forward to seeing how it's received from co-workers.
Brian, thanks for the review! I'm looking forward to checking that book out soon.