Using data smarter is an attitude of mind. It’s characterised by those who choose to communicate simply, clearly, and effectively, by making sense of the signals and cutting out the noise. Above all, it’s about empathy, humanity, and appreciating the likely data tolerance of your audience.

After our fifth collection of six great guests, it’s a wrap for Season Five of Data Malarkey – the podcast about using data smarter. Your host, master data storyteller Dr Sam Knowles, picks out common themes and chooses his highlights from a lively series of conversations – recorded remotely, via the medium of Riverside.fm, between February and May 2024.

Thanks as ever to Joe Hickey for production support.

Podcast artwork by Shatter Media.

Voice over by Samantha Boffin.

In Season Five, our guests included:

Sir David Spiegelhalter, Emeritus Professor of Statistics at the University of Cambridge.

Olivia Jensen, Deputy Director and Lead Scientist at the Institute for the Public Understanding of Risk based out of the University of Singapore.

Sorin Patilinet, Senior Director for Marketing Effectiveness at Mars (who’s also the Marketing Engineer).

Ian Whittaker, founder of Liberty Sky Advisors, the award-winning city analyst specialising in media and marketing.

John Hibbs, Co-Founder of CoEfficient, a software as a service company that helps organisations grow by measuring performance from the human perspective.

And Sir Simon Baron-Cohen, Professor of Developmental Psychopathology at Cambridge University, and director of the Autism Research Centre.

Data Malarkey is taking an extended summer vacation and is having all of August off – and then some. We’ll be back with Season Six on 11 September 2024 with another eclectic group of guests from an ever-more diverse set of professions. We’ll be hearing from women and men at the top of their game from the worlds of publishing, consumer goods, political punditry in the wake of the U.K. General Election, journalism, neuroscience, and numeracy. As usual, their common approaches to using data smarter have lessons for us all. And we start with Ylann Schemm who is both the Vice President of Corporate Responsibility for Elsevier, the world’s leading scientific publisher and data analytics company, and Director of the Elsevier Foundation.

To find out how you rank as a data storyteller, complete our data storytelling scorecard at https://data-storytelling.scoreapp.com. It takes just two minutes to answer 12 questions, and we’ll send you your own personalised scorecard which tells you what kind of data storyteller you are.