“Once upon a time, at the age of 24” Rosling said, “I was a student at St. John’s Medical College in Bangalore. I was a guest student during one month of a public health course. And that changed my mindset forever.”

What followed involved colored dots flying around a projected screen while he covered 150 years of history. Rosling has been using Gapminder World graphics to provide information about health and income around the world since 2006, but if you expect it to sound anything like a History 101 lecture, you’d be wrong.

The statistics work independently to create the spine of the story. Rosling breathlessly reveals the context via his talk. The two together form a complete narrative. The audience—admittedly one very open to Rosling’s argument—cheers him on in a presentation that gathers energy and roars through more than a century of information.

In an interview posted in September, he notes that what’s surprising about what he’s doing is not really anything new about the data itself, “it’s what we can do with animation, with trends, the change over time.”

What can journalists learn from Rosling’s use of graphics for storytelling? How to make numbers come to life. In Rosling’s TED talk, the crowd responded audibly as a moving dot representing China’s longevity and income dropped dramatically during the Great Leap Forward.

Viewers get complex statistical narratives rendered comprehensible and entertaining via a deceptively simple audio track. Rather than individual human subjects, Rosling’s stories take whole nations for their characters.

Any newsroom could do the same. The software and data are freely available to the public. Last fall, Storyboard contributing editor MacGregor Campbell worked with colleagues Peter Aldhous and Jim Giles to use Gapminder graphics in a story on U.S. health care for New Scientist. 

Some newspapers, especially The New York Times, are already using large datasets to tell interactive stories that let users control what they see (such as this intriguing breakdown of how people spend their time). Trailblazers like the Times and Rosling show how moving data points can link storytelling’s past to its future.

Adichie describes her own middle-class family’s servant in Nigeria and how her mother consistently characterized his family by its poverty. She felt pity for him, but then was surprised to discover one day that his mother made beautiful baskets. It had never occurred to her that they would be capable of making anything.

She extends the parallel to literature (that it is a Western phenomenon), to her American college roommate’s expectations about her (that she wouldn’t be able to speak English and would listen to tribal music) and her own mistaken impression of Mexicans (whom she had known of primarily through reading stories about illegal immigration).

She notes how impressionable and vulnerable we can be in the face of a story, and suggests that hearing only the dominant narrative cannot help but generate stereotypes.

Adichie’s words might find particular relevance for narrative reporters using the power of storytelling to portray another place or culture. And they bring to mind a comment that National Geographic reporter Tom O’Neill recently made in an interview on why he sometimes chooses not to focus on a single character in his narrative stories:

My experience from reading stories about one character is that they’re compelling, but sometimes they feel depopulated if the story is dealing with bigger issues. Of course it’s the skill of the writer to bring in the bigger issues. But if you’re doing something in Indonesia, and you find one person, the reader can feel like they didn’t get a sense of the larger experience.

The danger of the single story in narrative journalism doesn’t just involve whether to follow one subject or three; it can also rear its head in the portrayal of an entire country. In his Narrative Matters essay from this year, novelist Alexander McCall Smith writes about wondering how much of the AIDS crisis to include in his The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series, which he knew might help frame readers’ impressions of Botswana and Africa:

For me, as a novelist whose books—not as part of any concerted plan on my part—have been viewed as an introduction to a previously not very well-known country, the issue has been this: what should I say about AIDS? What role should AIDS play in a fictional account of the life of a country in the throes of the illness? Is writing about Botswana without mentioning the AIDS pandemic like writing about London during the Blitz without mentioning the fact that bombs were going off?

Ultimately, of course, no novelist or reporter can assume responsibility for fully representing a people or culture through a single story or even a series. But Adiche’s words might recommend that we know enough history to be aware of what came before, and not to simply reinforce the story that’s already out there.

“The problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue,” says Adichie, “but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story.”