Storytelling and Visualization
Storytelling has been a useful tool to communicate information and knowledge over time. Using visualizations to tell a story with data helps make the information more concise and memorable. Read this article through the 'User Engagement' section to explore the overall benefits of using data to tell stories that help the author break through the clutter and persuade people to action.
Related Work
Ma et al. state that a story that is well paced
exhibits deliberate control over the rate at which plot points occur.
They present a selection of scientific storytelling visualizations from
NASA related work and describes various examples.
The Scientific
Visualization Studio (SVS) at NASA uses storytelling visualization to
investigate observational data collected by instruments and sensors and
make it more suitable for consumption by the public.
The science museum presents visualization to the public with complex and abstract geographic phenomena at extreme size scales for explanatory animations. The science museums provide further interpretation through labels, videos, and live demonstrations. See Figure 3.
Figure 3. Ma et al. show the interactive software used at the Exploratorium in San Francisco. The purpose of this software is to educate users on the process of how tides, currents and rivers combine in the estuary of San Francisco bay. A touch-screen is used to place floats into the virtual water so that the user can see the effects of the current on the float. Users can watch the effects of predicted tide and river flow cycles on the floats trajectory. Other contextual information is provided as an animation alongside the visualization. Image courtesy of Ma et al.
Storytelling enables the user to interact with geographic data
such as the Earth's climate or the collapse of a star by using a story
model, such as story nodes or story transitions. Ma et al. is based
on previous scientific visualization work at NASA, based in the
scientific research center and scientific museum and describe how
visualization can be used to tell a good story, and tell it well. This
is a topic that the scientific visualization research community paid
little attention to at that time.
Tong et al. published a
storytelling visualization survey paper as a short paper in abridged
form. It contains no image or paper summaries. This is a full-length,
comprehensive, extended version of that survey. It is approximately
double the length.