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

The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
Department of Computer Science and Engineering


PhD Thesis 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:			Friday, 12 August 2022

Time:			2:00pm - 4:00pm

Zoom Meeting:
https://hkust.zoom.us/j/97978557248?pwd=c05ka09Cb0xxc0xJT2FKR0FKc01Pdz09

Chairperson:		Prof. Jiguang WANG (LIFS)

Committee Members:	Prof. Huamin QU (Supervisor)
 			Prof. Xiaojuan MA
 			Prof. Shuai WANG
 			Prof. Kai TANG (MAE)
 			Prof. Jiawan ZHANG (Tianjin University)


**** ALL are Welcome ****