A Journeyman’s (or Journeywoman’s) Guide to Evaluative Journey-Telling

Abstract Information: Just before dawn, a dark cypress tree stands under the moon and stars at the edge of a small village. That simple description of Vincent van Gogh’s world-renowned masterpiece, The Starry Night, doesn't evoke much emotion. The difference between that sentence and the painting itself plainly illustrates the power of visual imagery. When words fail you, visuals convey thematic elements and emotion with more power than words alone. Visuals are similarly powerful in the field of evaluation. For that reason, this presentation will explore three methods of journey-telling – visual storytelling of individuals’ personal programmatic journeys. First, we will guide participants down the path of journey mapping, the visual depiction of a program participant’s walk from point A to point B as they aim to accomplish a programmatic goal. Journey maps use evaluative concepts and simultaneously have the benefit of overcoming jargony language and dense paragraphs of text. We will weave in our experience journey mapping in our project to evaluate a program of the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS). We will then ramble down the road of logic model heatmapping. This technique combines classic evaluation elements such as logic models with dynamic visuals. This combination has the power to tell the story of a participant’s journey in a way that pulls your audience right in to walk along the path of the model. We have used heatmapping in describing community development programs in West Harlem, New York, lighting up the areas where work is most concentrated. Finally, we will plug in attendees to the simulated world of an AI visual storytelling. We will share our experience with visual AI programs depicting an evaluative journey. The work we have done with AI provides visual representations of program pathways. Session attendees will also go on a visual journey of their own – accomplishing the goal of improving their visual storytelling skills and walking away with tools they can implement right away in their work. A key benefit they will gain from visual journey-telling is the power to increase audience accessibility and better tell the story of participants themselves. The session will finish self-referentially, amplifying attendee voices by sharing a journey map of the presentation itself that attendees have helped populate.