Coupling Text and Visualization in Visual Storytelling for Data Communication

Visualization has long been integral to this era of data proliferation. Researchers and practitioners have focused on designing innovative visual displays, implementing sophisticated visualization tools, and developing interaction techniques to support data exploration and analysis. Recently, a growing community of visualization researchers has also emphasized the storytelling and communication potential of visualizations. The concept of visual storytelling is not new. News organizations and scientific platforms often use narrative content and visualizations to tell data-rich stories. However, a deeper understanding of the coupling of text and visualization in storytelling remains underexplored.

This thesis examines the combination of text and visualization in visual storytelling for data communication. Specifically, we investigated the coupling of text and visualization in four distinct phases. First, we conducted a crowdsourced study to understand different forms of the integration of text and visualization in current visual stories. Second, we developed GameViews, an interactive visualization system to support sportswriters and fans in forming their narratives for storytelling. Third, we presented GameRecapper to facilitate the creation of visual stories with automatically generated text and visual insights. Finally, we designed GameChat to explore how to communicate data-driven facts with text and visualizations in conversational agents.

These interactive systems and our study findings aim to go beyond current visual storytelling authoring approaches to facilitate the creation and understandings of visual storytelling in different domains for designers, journalists, analysts, and other researchers.