Metadata
Title
Narrative Visualization: Telling Stories with Data
Category
general
UUID
941748f0abb249de83907fc7ede07075
Source URL
https://idl.uw.edu/papers/narrative
Parent URL
https://idl.uw.edu/papers
Crawl Time
2026-03-11T03:12:37+00:00
Rendered Raw Markdown

Narrative Visualization: Telling Stories with Data

Source: https://idl.uw.edu/papers/narrative Parent: https://idl.uw.edu/papers

Edward Segel, Jeffrey Heer. IEEE Trans. Visualization & Comp. Graphics (Proc. InfoVis), 2010

Edward Segel, Jeffrey Heer

IEEE Trans. Visualization & Comp. Graphics (Proc. InfoVis), 2010

Steroids or Not, the Pursuit is On by the New York Times -- one of our case studies of narrative visualization.

Materials

PDF | Test-of-Time Award

Abstract

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.

BibTeX

@article{2010-narrative,
  title = {Narrative Visualization: Telling Stories with Data},
  author = {Segel, Edward AND Heer, Jeffrey},
  journal = {IEEE Trans. Visualization \& Comp. Graphics (Proc. InfoVis)},
  year = {2010},
  url = {https://idl.uw.edu/papers/narrative},
  doi = {10.1109/TVCG.2010.179}
}

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