For as long as he can remember, Matthew Kerkhoff has been fascinated by making videos. As a child, he dreamed of being a film director. Later in life, he studied videography at Purdue University and learned more about the industry and how he could make a living – even outside of Hollywood.
“It’s really telling stories that I’m interested in,” Kerkhoff said. “I love the entertainment side of it. Whether you’re making a movie or even making something like a commercial or advertisement, the goal is to tell a story and to connect with the audience.”
After college, Kerkhoff settled in Indiana and started carving out a career in video, doing everything from shooting television work to producing advertising content. Eventually, he got a job as a video producer for Purdue Marketing and Communications. As one of the university’s chief storytellers, Kerkhoff plays a vital role in communicating Purdue’s brand identity to students and viewers around the world.
“The videos I produce for Purdue, the ad content, those are stories as well,” Kerkhoff said.
Soon after Kerkhoff started at Purdue, he received an email about a series of new online certificate courses. The online program’s name, the Data Storytelling Certificate, immediately caught Kerkhoff’s eye.
“As someone who makes and edits videos, the emphasis on storytelling was really interesting to me,” Kerkhoff said. “I’m not super familiar with the data aspect of it, but I saw it as an opportunity to learn a new dimension of storytelling that could potentially help me in my video career.”
When Kerkhoff started the online classes, he didn’t know what to expect. He was worried that information would be highly technical, or that the data focus would be irrelevant to his career as a creative. But after taking a couple of the program’s courses, he understood that data literacy is an essential skill for everyone.
“Just as an individual in today’s world, you’re exposed to data constantly, and what I realize now is that a lot of that data is presented in a confusing or deceptive way, and understanding what it’s really saying is difficult,” Kerkhoff said. “In the classes, you learn how to present data effectively, but you also learn how to evaluate data and understand it better.”
Kerkhoff sometimes works with data analysts and other professionals who visualize data. After taking the data storytelling classes, he feels like he can more confidently evaluate and distinguish effective data visualization from ineffective data visualization – at his job and in the world at large.
“There are so many ways to present data, and there are some common ways of presenting data that, it turns out, aren’t actually very effective,” Kerkhoff said. “For instance, pie graphs are used all the time, but after taking those courses, now whenever I see a pie graph, I think about ways the information could have been presented more effectively.”
The biggest takeaway Kerkhoff got from the data storytelling courses is that storytelling is an important tool for conveying all kinds of information, whether it’s a technical research study or a feature film. From Kerkhoff’s perspective, the Data Storytelling Certificates brings storytelling and data literacy together, so that professionals working in all kinds of industries can learn how to present and evaluate information more effectively.
“The fact is, even if you’re not a creative or working in a creative industry, storytelling is one of the best ways to engage your audience and get them to remember what you’re saying,” Kerkhoff said. “Learning the fundamentals of telling a good story and also being able to increase your data literacy in the process, those are skills that anyone can use.”
For more information on Purdue’s Data Storytelling Certificate, including how to register for courses, please visit the program’s webpage.