Goals and Topics

Our goal with this workshop is to bring together data storytellers from diverse disciplines and continue the conversation of how these different fields utilize each other’s techniques and articulate principles for telling data narratives. Our target participants are researchers, journalists, bloggers, and others who seek to understand how visualizations support narrative, stories, and other communicative goals. Participants may be designers of such visualizations or designers of tools that support the creation of narrative visualizations. Visualizations that serve as a “community mirror” and thus create opportunities for discussion, reflection and sharing within a social network are also suitable topics. While we are inspired by many visualizations that display personal histories and storylines, our focus is on visualization situated in storytelling contexts, not necessarily visualizations of stories.

Specific topics of interest may include, but are not limited to:

Media and genres

  • Embedding visualizations in social media to tell stories
  • Multimodal storytelling with visualization (e.g. narrated or acted visualization, such as Rosling’s Gapminder presentations)
  • Non-traditional narrative – games and other procedural narratives incorporating data
  • Visualization in (data)journalism – how news stories and visualization can complement each other
  • Visualizations that support specific types of stories:
    • Personal stories (“Here’s a history of my cancer treatment”)
    • Community and collaboration stories (“How has our Facebook group changed over the past year?”)
    • Public data sets and narrative (“What is your Senator doing with your taxes?”)
    • Fictional, semi-fictional, and non-fiction stories

 

End-user agency in interactive storytelling with data and visualization

  • Visualizations that integrate tools to help users tell their stories: bookmarking, annotation, and animation
  • Examples from field research of people telling stories with visualization
  • Helping users transition from consuming an infographic (i.e. reading a story) to using the data and visualization to tell their own stories
  • Interactivity models which blend authorial agency: both the visualization creator and the end-user can create and tell their own stories.
  • User-appropriation of visualizations to share unexpected stories
  • Issues of reception: the role of the end-user’s prior knowledge, goals, and socio-cultural context in interpreting stories with data

 

Design issues

  • Design methods / processes or best practices for data storytelling; stories incorporating data, or data incorporating stories?
  • Design of visualizations that tell their own stories (standalone, without additional context)
  • The responsibilities of the designer to objective data storytelling: Should provenance information (e.g., data sources, notes on data manipulation and visual mapping, labeled inferences) be included in the creation of more persuasive, suggestive narrative visualizations?

 

Temporal dynamics

  • The role of time: are all stories time-based? How do narrative visualizations support time?
  • Conversation unfolding around visualized stories – how do stories continue to be told in user comments?
  • The evolution of “viewing codes”, the implicit conventions for interpreting visualizations that storytelling depends on. How do these emerge and change with visualization storytelling practices?

 

Evaluation and critique

  • New evaluation methods for narrative visualizations
  • Assessing and predicting the probable stories suggested by a narrative visualization given the influences of designers, end-users, and context on interpretation