Hey Laura - thanks for the welcome. I like the brainstorming already! As to your question, no one likes the answer "it depends" but that's the answer, and it depends on....the data. If you have sufficient data and it's structured, I can do a basic chart in a few hours. Something more creative and design intensive usually takes a week or two, depending on scale.
If there's something measurable and the data can be easily structured in a table (csv or excel) then that's when the magic can come to life for the visual data story.
e.g. Baudelaire has a wikipedia page with all his works with publishing year included. We can use that as a jumping off point, but the question becomes, what do we measure? His downloads and available works on Gutenberg? That's a solid start, but can we go further and make it really creative? Greg and I talked about keeping things lightweight on both ends (mine and Gutenbergs), but if the data is there, the possibilities are numerous.
As a passion project, I just completed this look at the 2019 Watchmen sequel. Love that story and I went in search of something to really let people dig into. This took about a month working on it on and off.
Enjoy!
Josh