Narrative Sensemaking: Strategies for Narrative Maps Construction

TL;DR

This paper investigates how analysts create narrative maps from news articles to enhance understanding of sequential information, aiming to improve visualization and extraction methods for better sensemaking.

Contribution

It provides an analysis of analyst strategies in constructing narrative maps, informing the design of visualization and extraction tools for narrative sensemaking.

Findings

Insights into analyst construction strategies

Guidelines for designing narrative map visualizations

Recommendations for improving extraction algorithms

Abstract

Narrative sensemaking is a fundamental process to understand sequential information. Narrative maps are a visual representation framework that can aid analysts in this process. They allow analysts to understand the big picture of a narrative, uncover new relationships between events, and model connections between storylines. As a sensemaking tool, narrative maps have applications in intelligence analysis, misinformation modeling, and computational journalism. In this work, we seek to understand how analysts construct narrative maps in order to improve narrative map representation and extraction methods. We perform an experiment with a data set of news articles. Our main contribution is an analysis of how analysts construct narrative maps. The insights extracted from our study can be used to design narrative map visualizations, extraction algorithms, and visual analytics tools to support the sensemaking process.