Interviews, research and how-to articles.

Insights

Storytelling allows visualization to reveal information as effectively and intuitively as if the viewer were watching a movie.

Communications of the ACM

What Storytelling Can Do For Information Visualization

Stories are not only a good way to present data, they also work as a means of packaging information and
knowledge in a way that is easy to pick up by another person.

Data Plus Science

Storytelling: The Next Step for Visualization

Examining the design of interactive articles by synthesizing theory from disciplines such as education, journalism, and visualization.

Distill.pub

Communicating with Interactive Articles

Victor is the cofounder of TARGO, a two-time Emmy-nominated virtual reality production studio. In this interview we talk about VR storytelling techniques, predictions for the industry and hardware improvements.

Buried Signals

Victor Agulhon: Virtual Reality Journalism

Narrative visualizations combine conventions of communicative and exploratory information visualization to convey an intended story. We demonstrate visualization rhetoric as an analytical framework for understanding how design techniques that prioritize particular interpretations in visualizations that “tell a story” can significantly affect end-user interpretation.

Visualization Rhetoric: Framing Effects in Narrative Visualization

Many factors can shape the flow of visual data-driven stories, and thereby the way readers experience those stories. Through the analysis of 80 existing stories found on popular websites, we systematically investigate and identify seven characteristics of these stories, which we name “flow-factors,” and we illustrate how they feed into the broader concept of “visual narrative flow.

SCI UTAH

Visual Narrative Flow: Exploring Factors Shaping Data Visualization Story Reading Experiences

The pain of having to know a set of skills that are far removed from the work of journalism, which always has a deadline. These are common hardships with building interactive stories, publishing and optimising so that it can be read by thousands on low-powered phones. Journalists can’t worry about these things. Idyll is about solving all of those problems.

Matt Conlen - Explorables and the Convergence of Storytelling

Many data stories in journalism do not have a story arc, but rather present facts without much structure. This mirrors the
popular inverted pyramid style of writing that presents the most important information up front, to be followed by evidence.
We have found a subset of stories that follow a more structured approach, however. These stories begin with a claim or question,
but do not immediately present that as the conclusion. Instead, they then present pieces of evidence that are only tied together,
and back to the initial claim, at the end.

Kosara Eurovis

An Argument Structure for Data Stories

Data visualization is regularly promoted for its ability to reveal stories within data, yet these “data stories” differ in important ways from traditional forms of storytelling. Storytellers, especially online journalists, have increasingly been integrating visualizations into their narratives, in some cases allowing the visualization to function in place of a written story. In this paper, we systematically review the design space of this emerging class of visualizations.

Stanford

Narrative Visualization: Telling Stories with Data

In this paper, Bret Victor suggests that the long-standing focus on “interaction” may be misguided. For a majority subset of software, called “information software,” I argue that interactivity is actually a curse for users and a crutch for designers, and users’ goals can be better satisfied through other means.

Worry Dream

Magic Ink: Information Software and the Graphical Interface

While some individual news media have clearly been very successful at building online reach or convincing people to subscribe, and developed new offers across podcast, video, and newsletters, this year’s data show many publishers are still struggling to come to terms with structural changes that have been ravaging the industry for more than a decade.

Insights

What Storytelling Can Do For Information...

Storytelling: The Next Step for Visualiz...

Communicating with Interactive Articles

Victor Agulhon: Virtual Reality Journali...

Visualization Rhetoric: Framing Effects ...

Visual Narrative Flow: Exploring Factors...