SketchStory: Telling More Engaging Stories with Data through Freeform Sketching

Abstract

Presenting and communicating insights to an audience-telling a story-is one of the main goals of data exploration. Even though visualization as a storytelling medium has recently begun to gain attention, storytelling is still underexplored in information visualization and little research has been done to help people tell their stories with data. To create a new, more engaging form of storytelling with data, we leverage and extend the narrative storytelling attributes of whiteboard animation with pen and touch interactions. We present SketchStory, a data-enabled digital whiteboard that facilitates the creation of personalized and expressive data charts quickly and easily. SketchStory recognizes a small set of sketch gestures for chart invocation, and automatically completes charts by synthesizing the visuals from the presenter-provided example icon and binding them to the underlying data. Furthermore, SketchStory allows the presenter to move and resize the completed data charts with touch, and filter the underlying data to facilitate interactive exploration. We conducted a controlled experiment for both audiences and presenters to compare SketchStory with a traditional presentation system, Microsoft PowerPoint. Results show that the audience is more engaged by presentations done with SketchStory than PowerPoint. Eighteen out of 24 audience participants preferred SketchStory to PowerPoint. Four out of five presenter participants also favored SketchStory despite the extra effort required for presentation.

Telling Stories about Dynamic Networks with Graph Comics

“…Since then, several authoring systems have appeared. For example SketchStory [32] proposed a technique for live presentation, and Ellipsis [40], Contextifier [23], and sense.us [20] offer an authoring environment to augment existing visualization with annotations and mechanisms to induce a storyline. While recent studies have investigated several storytelling mediums, such as infographics [7,9] or data videos [2], many of these genres, including comics, have not been studied in relation to their communicative potential for conveying insights about dynamic networks.…”

QuteVis: Visually Studying Transportation Patterns Using Multisketch Query of Joint Traffic Situations

“…Visualization-by-Sketching [15] enabled artists and other visual experts to create accurate and expressive data visualizations by painting on top of a digital data canvas. SketchStory [10] allowed the presenter to record a sequence of charts along with example icons before the presentation, and to invoke them with simple sketch gestures in real-time. SketchSliders [17] provided a mobile sketching interface to create sliders which interact with multi-dimensional datasets on a wall display.…”

Structuring Visualization Mock-Ups at the Graphical Level by Dividing the Display Space

“…Some offer programmatic APIs, like D3 [6] and Vega [44], while others offer GUIs with more or less advanced mapping capabilities, ranging form simple chart templates in Excel, to more expressive data-binding options in Tableau/Polaris [48], Lyra [43], iVisDesigner [40], or Voyager [61]the latter even provides mapping recommendations to support exploration. Meanwhile, Sketchstories [32] offers a sketching interface that allows users to invoke chart schema using simple gestures.…”