We talked about micro stories. At the other end of data-driven story telling is something that I would call, just to contrast it directly with micro story, a mega story. In mega story, one uses lots and lots of data that may have been collected over a long time. This data represents events at many levels of granularities. These events may be organized based on location, time, theme, person, groups, things or any other ‘concept’ that the storyteller wants to communicate. In many cases, possibly most cases, this data may not be collected by one person, but may be extracted from several sources, transformed it into a suitable unified representation, and then properly organized for the storyteller to render his story.
As a start to discussing mega stories, lets just see such a story in action by a master mega storyteller Hans Rosling. Please visit: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbkSRLYSojo
What did you think of this story? This is a data-driven story put together by collecting data from different sources and rendering it in a very interesting way.
The link provides an eloquent example of a mega story, which quickly orientate you in the specifics of the genre making it possible to differentiate it from the micro story. Some notions are better explained through their oppposites.