Using visualization to create narratives and engage audiences
Speakers
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In recent years public organizations and governments are increasingly expected to provide data to a more general audience. In a world where public data is no longer consumed by experts only, they too must redefine their role. Most organizations are writing stories on top of their data in an effort to get more attention - pushing data with narratives. This may or may not reach an audience, as the most interesting subjects are not necessarily the most visible. Conversely, many organizations are opening their data, providing the raw material for other people's stories - letting them pull data. This can lead to interpretation errors. With that approach, the least popular subjects would also never be covered. With that in mind, how can public organizations best serve citizens and support their need for clear information?
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Jerome Cukier is data editor at the OECD. He works on data communication, and manages the OECD Factblog which features economic stories illustrated with charts. Prior to that, he managed a videogames development studio. Jerome holds an MBA from the University of Texas as Austin and a masters degree from EM Lyon.
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In this talk, we will discuss and contrast the narrative structure used to help bring understanding to data and use that understanding of the data to transition into a broader understanding of the context in which the data exists. We will view two video based visualizations and explore how they use things like familiarity and pacing to construct a story around the data in order to serve as an anchor in the viewers' minds on the topic surrounding the data in question.
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Matthias Shapiro is a Silverlight visualization designer/developer based in Salt Lake City, Utah. He has an MS in Information Design and Technology from Georgia Institute of Technology. His talk on effective information visualization at Ignite Salt Lake City in 2009 was selected as a weekly highlight by O'Reilly's Ignite Show. He has spoken internationally about the process of creating practical and effective data visualizations from real-time automated visualizations to low tech "found object" visualizations and is a contributing author to "Beautiful Visualization", an O'Reilly compilation of data visualization techniques and projects.
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CNN Digital producer/writer Manav Tanneeru and sr. usability analyst Toni Pashley will discuss CNN.com's "Home and Away" project, an immersive interactive which allows users to learn about and pay tribute to more than 6,000 fallen troops from more than 20 countries.
Available at www.cnn.com/homeandaway, this extensive data visualization project began nearly 10 years ago at the start of the war in Afghanistan. A cross-divisional effort between the CNN Library and CNN.com, a team of researchers, producers, designers, user-experience specialists and developers have gathered information about the casualties of the wars. Evolving from two separate lists of casualties in Afghanistan and Iraq, "Home and Away" tells the story of where and how the lives of these troops began and ended, and is continually enhanced with personal memories from family and friends.
bios
Manav Tanneeru is a producer and writer for CNN.com and is based in Atlanta, Georgia. He produces multimedia features, data visualization projects and in-depth special reports. He also reports and writes on a variety of topics, including politics, business and foreign affairs. Some of his recent projects include the "Home and Away" initiative which tracks U.S. and coalition casualties in Afghanistan and Iraq; the "Black in America: Journeys" multimedia feature, which detailed African-American migration dating back to the first Census; and a series of data-driven features during the 2008 presidential election that tracked the campaigns. He also was a producer of the CNN.com's breaking news blog, This Just In, during its launch. Tanneeru joined CNN.com in 2005.
Toni Pashley is a senior usability analyst for CNN Digital and is based in Atlanta, Georgia. She and her team work closely with visual designers, videographers, technologists, television producers, and editorial teams to bring the broad digital experience of CNN to life. She also leads and is responsible for the User Experience team's innovative approach to interactive storytelling and data-driven narrative design projects. She is a 15-year veteran of the interactive design field and has been recognized for her ground-breaking expertise in data visualization and mobile application design. She graduated from Georgia Institute of Technology with a M.S. in Human Computer Interaction. Pashley joined CNN.com in 2006.
abstract | download slides (PDF)
In this talk I will explore the intersection of interaction science, storytelling, and game design in the context of interactive data-driven information graphics. In particular, I will present game design as one subset of interactive narrative synthesis that can help shed light on how to create interactive visual experiences with ancillary benefits related to sensemaking, insight generation, and engagement with data. Preliminary design experiences and evaluations in this space will serve as starting-points for further discussion on how to make journalistic data playable.
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Nicholas Diakopoulos is a Computing Innovation Fellow at the School of Communication and Information at Rutgers University. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the School of Interactive Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology in 2009. His research interests span human computer interaction, information visualization, and multimedia content analysis with themes from media including journalism, collaborative authorship and annotation, and games.
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Narratology, the theory for understanding, analyzing, and evaluating texts, images, or other cultural artifacts that "tell a story," represents a promising direction for future research. I discuss how information visualizations and texts are similar, distinguishing between exploratory and expository visualizations. I then introduce several narratological devices intended to increase insight into the interpretative process. These include criteria for determining when a visualization expresses a narrative, the three primary layers used to analyze a narrative system, and the idea of perspective as understood in narratology and applied to InfoVis. Although narratological analysis assumes meaning to be made in the present, guided by design yet influenced by contextual factors, the framework is semiotic in nature. This raises a final question I hope to address: whether systematic narrative analysis can effectively deal with the interplay between objectivity and subjectivity that increasingly characterizes casual information visualizations.
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I am a doctoral student studying information visualization at the University of Michigan School of Information with advisor Eytan Adar. My research focuses on how affective, aesthetic, and social factors influence visualization perception and interpretation, and visualization for multi-touch. Prior to joining the doctoral program, I received an M.S.I. in Information Analysis & Retrieval at UM School of Information, an M.F.A. in Writing & Poetics from Naropa University, and a B.A. in Comparative Studies from Ohio State University.
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In creating, generating and sharing mediated stories, our choice of media capture system, editing and composition software, visualization method or publishing platform greatly impacts the types of stories told, how they are displayed, how they are responded to and how they can be understood. In this presentation I will focus on three facets of my research directly concerned with rich-media storytelling, interactive social media visualizations and visual summaries of social media activity. Findings from an ethnographic study of storytelling best practices will be examined and the design, development and evaluation of 5 diverse computational story systems will be presented.
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Aisling Kelliher is an assistant professor in Media Communication Systems and Theory in the School of Arts, Media and Engineering at Arizona State University. Storytelling is the essential process of cultural formation and exchange that forms the foundation of her research approach. Over the last decade, she has created desktop, mobile and online software systems and installations to facilitate cultural sensemaking through the creation, sharing and interpretation of rich media compositions. Her work has been published in diverse venues including the Journal of Science Education and Technology, SIGCHI, ISEA, CIKM, ICWSM and WWW, and exhibited at leading national cultural events including SIGGRAPH and the Boston Cyberarts Festival. Her research is supported by grants from the MacArthur Foundation, NSF IGERT, DR K12 and CreativeIT programs.
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In data analysis, stories are often implicit – analytic tasks like annotating data, collecting evidence, posing questions, and synthesizing findings often take on a narrative bent, especially in a collaborative setting. Our experiences building tools for collaborative visual analysis have illustrated these sorts of emergent narratives and are motivating our current work on supporting sharing and storytelling for data visualization. We will discuss tools we've constructed that allow participants to connect text comments and visualizations into larger narrative structures and share them via social media. We will also share findings, insights, and examples drawn from recent live deployments of these tools, and encourage discussion about how collaboration tools can better support storytelling as part of analysis practice.
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Wesley Willett is a Ph.D. student at UC Berkeley's Department of Computer Science. He is part of the Berkeley Institute of Design (BiD) and the Visualization Lab. Wes's research interests span collaborative visual analysis, information visualization, new media, and human computer interaction.
abstract | download slides (PDF)
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Jock Mackinlay is Tableau Software's Director of Visual Analysis. He has a Ph.D. in computer science from Stanford University, where he pioneered the automatic design of graphical presentations of relational information. Jock joined Xerox PARC in 1986, where he collaborated with the User Interface Research Group to develop many novel applications of computer graphics for information access, coining the term "Information Visualization." Much of the fruits of this research can be seen in his book, "Readings in Information Visualization: Using Vision to Think" (Morgan Kauffman, written and edited with Stuart K. Card and Ben Shneiderman). Jock joined Tableau Software in 2004. He is a co‐inventor of numerous software patents related to information visualization and human computer interaction. In 2009, Jock received the Visualization Technical Achievement Award from the IEEE Visualization and Graphics Technical Committee for his seminal technical work on automatic presentation tools and new visual metaphors for information visualization.