Paper: Storytelling, The Next Step for Visualization

Visualization is often considered to consist of three phases: exploration, analysis, and presentation. While the former two topics are covered well in the literature, there has been very little work specifically on presentation. In an upcoming paper, Jock Mackinlay and I argue that presentation, and in particular storytelling and communication of data, are the logical next step for the field, and provide some research directions.

The paper is titled Storytelling: The Next Step for Visualization and was written for IEEE Computer, in particular the Special Issue on Cutting-Edge Research in Visualization, to be published in May. This is important context to understand what we were trying to achieve and why the paper’s style is a bit unusual.

That entire special issue is likely to be very interesting. The guest editors, Min Chen and Theresa-Marie Rhyne, asked people in the field to write about what they envision visualization research to do 5, 10, or even 15 years in the future. While I don’t know what other papers will be in the issue, I’ve heard rumors that there were some high-profile submissions. And the topic clearly lends itself to some interesting thought experiments.

Our paper first explores the history of presentation and  storytelling with visualization, though there really isn’t much there. Only a handful of papers can really count as presentation, so we had to reach back a bit and include some historical perspective that goes beyond the visualization literature. We then talk about our particular idea of how we think storytelling should be approached, [...]