Coupling Story to Visualization: Using Textual Analysis as a Bridge Between Data and Interpretation

TL;DR

This paper presents a method that uses natural language processing and visualization techniques to automatically link narrative text with supporting data visualizations, enhancing reader engagement and understanding in data-rich journalism.

Contribution

It introduces an integrated approach combining textual analysis and visualization to automatically create narrative visualizations from journalistic stories.

Findings

Successfully extracts narrative components from sports stories

Enables bidirectional interaction between text and visualization

Improves reader exploration and understanding of data-rich narratives

Abstract

Online writers and journalism media are increasingly combining visualization (and other multimedia content) with narrative text to create narrative visualizations. Often, however, the two elements are presented independently of one another. We propose an approach to automatically integrate text and visualization elements. We begin with a writer's narrative that presumably can be supported with visual data evidence. We leverage natural language processing, quantitative narrative analysis, and information visualization to (1) automatically extract narrative components (who, what, when, where) from data-rich stories, and (2) integrate the supporting data evidence with the text to develop a narrative visualization. We also employ bidirectional interaction from text to visualization and visualization to text to support reader exploration in both directions. We demonstrate the approach with a case study in the data-rich field of sports journalism.