GUIDANCE ON DATA STORYTELLING: MAKING DATA STORIES UNDERSTANDABLE AND COMPELLING FOR THE GENERAL PUBLIC

PhD Thesis Proposal Defence


Title: "GUIDANCE ON DATA STORYTELLING: MAKING DATA STORIES UNDERSTANDABLE AND 
COMPELLING FOR THE GENERAL PUBLIC "

by

Miss Leni YANG


Abstract:

In an increasingly data-driven world, data democratization that everyone can 
access, understand, and leverage data to make informed decisions becomes a 
vision worth pursuing. In the process of data democratization, data 
storytelling that combines storytelling and data visualizations plays a 
critical role in communicating data insights to the general public engagingly 
and effectively. With the advancement and variation of communication media, 
data storytelling emerged in various forms. Thus, systematic investigations of 
the design strategies of data storytelling are demanded for facilitating story 
creation. In this thesis, I conducted qualitative and quantitative studies to 
derive design strategies of data stories and experimental studies to verify 
their effectiveness to provide guidance on:

(1) Enhancing the comprehension of data stories. While novel and customized 
data visualizations are used in data stories for creating compelling 
storytelling experiences, without proper guidance, unfamiliar visualizations 
could confuse the general audience. Prior work has proposed various forms of 
guidance on how to read a chart; however, little research has explored how to 
introduce a visualization in oral presentations which is a common and important 
data storytelling scenario. To fill this gap, my first study aims at giving 
clear verbal introductions for visualization in oral presentations.

(2) Creating a compelling data storytelling experience. I collect and analyze 
professional practices of data stories in the wild to extract their design 
strategies related to the narrative structure and visual design, the two most 
discussed aspects that determine the storytelling experience. In the second 
study, I propose a design space for applying Freytag's Pyramid, a traditional 
story structure, to data stories. The third study focuses on data stories in 
virtual reality that is in an early stage with little empirical knowledge of 
the visual designs. In particular, I draw inspiration from popular 3D data 
videos and study how to adapt them to VR data videos.

I hope the design implications from these study results would guide and inspire 
data storytellers in creating understandable and compelling data stories, serve 
as prior studies for (semi-)automatic data story authoring tools, and 
ultimately contribute to efficiently and effectively communicating data to the 
general public.


Date:			Thusdday, 9 June 2022

Time:                  	2:00pm - 4:00pm

Zoom Meeting: 
https://hkust.zoom.us/j/98305471887?pwd=dnhzYkQvdkhxVEFKM1ZXeUFLTld3UT09

Committee Members:	Prof. Huamin Qu (Supervisor)
  			Dr. Amir Goharshady (Chairperson)
 			Dr. Lionel Parreaux
 			Dr. Mingming Fan (ISD)


**** ALL are Welcome ****