Critical Data Storytelling for Libraries: : Crafting Ethical Narratives for Advocacy and Impact

After several years of writing, with help from many colleagues along the way, my new book is coming out this month! 

I wrote this book because library workers who collect data are often siloed from those who tell stories. This book speaks to both audiences—data and story experts—to tackle common obstacles mindfully, with awareness of power and who has been historically excluded. I’ve based it on my 30 years of library work as well as my workshops and consulting, through which I frequently working struggling librarians to tell better data stories. This book brings together current, critical insights for using data ethically for library advocacy, social justice, and inclusivity.

 

Sadly, rising pro-censorship movements and shrinking budgets threaten institutions like libraries, where anyone can walk in the door without having to believe or buy anything. We are seeing active defunding of libraries at every political level in our society today, federal to local. Tragically, many detractors are reacting to misinformation about libraries rather than understanding their actual impact. Inspiring people in libraries to tell well-evidenced and inspiring data stories about what libraries mean for communities is key to library survival.

My goal is to support all library workers, from the smallest rural public libraries to the largest academic ones, as they justify annual budgets, services, and, in many cases now, their very existence. We need critical and practical approaches in times like these in order to sustain libraries as vital democratic institutions. The book is dedicated “to the fearless warriors who understand the power of words and learning and the freedom from tyranny that libraries must represent.” Those are the librarians I know, and I wrote this book to support them. Orders in the US can be placed here:  https://alastore.ala.org/critdatst

International order have a separate page: https://alastore.ala.org/international-orders

I hope you enjoy this mini-excerpt from the introduction, explaining the concept of "critical data storytelling:"

"Critical Storytelling: Understanding Storyteller, Audience, and Story Relationships"

"Critical data storytelling brings the concepts of narratively patterned information

and narrative experience together with one more set of ideas: that people are

impacted by the social conditions of their lives in ways that determine whether

they have the power to change them. This approach is critical, which means

to think rationally and with healthy skepticism about what is, what might be,

and what should be. Critical approaches ask questions about how things work,

and why, in order to understand, analyze what is, and propose ways to make

things better. Critical theory focuses on understanding power, who has it, how

it operates, and its consequences for people’s lives.

Critical theory has a long history. It stretches from long before the Frankfurt

school philosophers (Arato and Gebhardt 1982), whose prescient concerns

about mass media in the 1930s seem eerily applicable in the era of internet

misinformation. It has continued to Kimberlé Crenshaw’s critical race theory

scholarship (1989) that questions the uneven, legal distribution of power based

on race and racism in the United States, and beyond. More recently, the term

critical theory has become politically polarized (and chapter 4 covers polarized

audiences in greater depth). In general, any time leaders try to keep citizens

from questioning how power works, citizens can develop a critical approach to

assert their right to ask questions. More specifically, information professionals

should be critical and vocal any time legislatures outlaw words, books, or ways

of thinking. Because storytelling is powerful, and because stories justify power

and balance, critical theory is key to understanding the applications of data

storytelling for library advocacy." (p. xviii)

from McDowell, K. (2025). Critical Data Storytelling for Libraries: Crafting Ethical Narratives for Advocacy and Impact (Critical Cultural Information Studies series). ALA Editions. 

https://alastore.ala.org/critdatst

References:

Arato, Andrew, Eike Gebhardt, and Paul Piccone. 1982. The Essential Frankfurt

School Reader. Continuum.

Crenshaw, Kimberlé. 1989. “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and

Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist

Theory and Antiracist Politics.” University of Chicago Legal Forum, no. 1.

https://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/uclf/vol1989/iss1/8.