Isabel Prado-Tucker, a Dartmouth ’28 studying Quantitative Social Science and Geography, won the CAUSE Data Scrollytelling Contest with her QSS 19 final project. Isabel’s winning project “Heavy Rain & High Water” is an interactive scrollytelling platform built using JavaScript (D3.js) and R. It visualizes climate model outputs and floodplain maps to make complex spatial risks and extreme precipitation data accessible and intuitive for public audiences. Prado-Tucker, a Research Assistant for Professor Jonathan Winter in the Applied Hydroclimatology Group, drew inspiration for this project from the group’s work on the 2026 Massachusetts Climate Assessment.
Reflecting on QSS, Isabel shares, “Majoring in QSS has strengthened my technical skills, making me comfortable wrangling large, messy datasets and applying various statistical analysis and machine learning techniques. But arguably just as important are the communication skills I’ve gained. Data shouldn’t exist in a silo, and effective storytelling bridges the gap between quantitative research and real-world impact. Projects like this one for Professor Robert Cooper’s Advanced Data Visualization course pushed me to think creatively about how to translate complex datasets into engaging stories for public audiences.”