Narrative Visualization: Telling Stories with Data

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. Drawing on case studies from news media to visualization research, we identify distinct genres of narrative visualization. We characterize these design differences, together with interactivity and messaging, in terms of the balance between the narrative flow intended by the author (imposed by graphical elements and the interface) and story discovery on the part of the reader (often through interactive exploration). Our framework suggests design strategies for narrative visualization, including promising under-explored approaches to journalistic storytelling and educational media.

1 Introduction

In recent years, many have commented on the storytelling potential of data visualization. News organizations including the New York Times, Washington Post, and the Guardian regularly incorporate dynamic graphics into their journalism. Politicians, activists, and television reporters use interactive visualizations as a backdrop for stories about global health and economics [10] and election results [9]. A recent feature in The Economist [6] explores the proliferation of digital data and notes that visualization designers are “melding the skills of computer science, statistics, artistic design and storytelling.”