Interactive Storytelling Notes

Narrative Visualizations - Jeff Heer - 2010:

"Visualizations themselves may incorporate a variety of media, including text, images and video, and can also be interactive, enabling stories whose telling relies as much on the reader as on the author."

"Note that narrative messaging techniques are more frequently used in Slideshows and Videos, as these genres put more effort into communicating the narrative intended by the author. This may explain why qualitatively these visualizations feel more like “stories” and less like data tools."

"Both messaging and interactivity can be layered on top of these genres. Messaging is the use of text to provide observations and explanations about the images. Typically this text takes familiar forms such as headlines, captions, labels, and annotations. For some visualizations, messaging can also include audio. "

"There are many possible types and degrees of interactivity, though common forms in narrative visualization include navigation buttons, hover highlighting, hover details-on-demand, filtering, searching, drill-down, zooming, and time sliders. "

"Narrative visualizations differ in important ways from traditional forms of storytelling. In journalism, one presents related material and sources together in a “block progression” to have clear and logical transitions, and digresses “often, but not for long” [2]. Interactive stories present difficulties for these recommendations, as giving narrative control to the reader permits lengthy unordered digressions. The de- sign structures we identify help counter these pitfalls."

"Generalizing across our examples, data stories appear to be most effective when they have constrained interaction at various checkpoints within a narrative, allowing the user to explore the data without veering too far from the intended narrative. That said, further exploration of transitions between author- and reader-driven elements presents an exciting area for researchers and practitioners."

"For example, a martini glass structure for a visualization may be weaved into a text story: static images might first support the text and introduce the visualization; an embedded interactive visualization may appear later, perhaps with links in the text setting visualization parameters to highlight points made within the prose; finally, at the article’s end, the visualization may open up to enable free exploration. "

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