Choose Your Vis-Adventure
How interactive comics can help data-driven storytelling.
While instantly understanding the gist or identifying overall trends from a data visualization may be in some people’s skillset, it is difficult for a lot of folks. Storytelling is one strategy that more and more visualization researchers are using to make understanding graphs easier for the people reading them. Interactivity can make such storytelling even more effective.
As a case in point, the authors of a recent paper on interactive data comics describe how interactivity can be added to data comics, a form of data-driven storytelling based on “sequential art”. Their pièce de résistance is 𝙲𝚘𝚖𝚒𝚌𝚂𝚌𝚛𝚒𝚙𝚝, a programming language for adding interactivity to data comics. Watch the below video to learn more about the work:
Basically, 𝙲𝚘𝚖𝚒𝚌𝚂𝚌𝚛𝚒𝚙𝚝 is a programming language for data comic n00bs like you and me. Their JSON-based, lightweight scripting language lets you add interaction to ALL 👏THE 👏 THINGS👏. In other words, 𝙲𝚘𝚖𝚒𝚌𝚂𝚌𝚛𝚒𝚙𝚝 lets you change the content, layout, structure, appearance, and interactivity of data comics.
Creating an interactive data comic consists of writing a declarative specification that brings in images for the panels, organizing them into a layout, and then adding interactivity. In addition to adding sliders, text fields, and other UI elements for readers to interact with or enter data into, operators let interactive data comic creators do many things such as highlighting, appending panels, loading layouts, panning and zooming, etc.
Using the 𝙲𝚘𝚖𝚒𝚌𝚂𝚌𝚛𝚒𝚙𝚝 language, the authors then show several examples of using to create interactive data comics:
The research team then brought in six professional illustrators, designers, and data comic fans to evaluate 𝙲𝚘𝚖𝚒𝚌𝚂𝚌𝚛𝚒𝚙𝚝 by creating their own interactive data comics. The authors conducted interviews to find the participants’ goals, ideation, creative processes, and challenges. They also asked about the future improvements to 𝙲𝚘𝚖𝚒𝚌𝚂𝚌𝚛𝚒𝚙𝚝 and its prospects for interactive storytelling. The creatives found that despite being able to build interactive data comics “with little to no help,” there was still quite a learning curve. They also suggested extending operations to deal with commonly occurring syntax errors.
Participant feedback led to six goals for interactivity in data comics: (1) navigation and (2) branches between panels, which can harness childhood nostalgia à la choose-your-own-adventure means to move around the story. Furthermore, they suggested (3) details-on-demand to let people drill down if they want to. Folks should be able to (4) enter data into the comic to engage or play with the data parameters for even more insights. Interactivity should also support (5) multiple perspectives, like telling the same story from different points of view. This can help people look at the data in a new way. Finally, interactivity should allow for (6) pauses and revelations of information. This basically adds the **dun-dun-DUNNN** sound effect to your data comic by building drama as the story unfolds.
In summary, interactivity can make data-driven storytelling more powerful and compelling.
Score: 12/10. Would use 𝙲𝚘𝚖𝚒𝚌𝚂𝚌𝚛𝚒𝚙𝚝!
References
- Wang, Z., Romat, H., Chevalier, F., Riche, N. H., Murray-Rust, D., & Bach, B. (2021). Interactive Data Comics. IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, 28(1), 944–954. 10.1109/TVCG.2021.3114849
- GitHub: https://interactivedatacomics.github.io/
