Bubble Storytelling with Automated Animation: A Brexit Hashtag Activism Case Study

TL;DR

This paper presents an automated system for creating animated bubble chart stories from hashtag data, streamlining the process of visual storytelling and viewer interaction in social media analysis.

Contribution

It introduces a prototype system that automates animation insertion in bubble stories, reducing manual effort and enhancing storytelling efficiency.

Findings

System effectively automates bubble animation creation.

User study shows improved storytelling experience.

Use cases demonstrate practical applicability.

Abstract

Hashtag data are common and easy to acquire. Thus, they are widely used in studies and visual data storytelling. For example, a recent story by China Central Television Europe (CCTV Europe) depicts Brexit as a hashtag movement displayed on an animated bubble chart. However, creating such a story is usually laborious and tedious, because narrators have to switch between different tools and discuss with different collaborators. To reduce the burden, we develop a prototype system to help explore the bubbles' movement by automatically inserting animations connected to the storytelling of the video creators and the interaction of viewers to those videos. We demonstrate the usability of our method through both use cases and a semi-structured user study.