Expert exploranation for communicating scientific methods -- A case study in conflict research

TL;DR

This paper introduces expert exploranation, combining visualization techniques to effectively communicate complex scientific methods to researchers, enhancing understanding and accessibility within specialized fields.

Contribution

It develops and evaluates interactive visual stories for explaining causal inference methods to conflict researchers, demonstrating the potential of expert exploranation.

Findings

Positive feedback from experts unfamiliar with the method

Improved understanding of complex methods

Effective visual storytelling for scientific communication

Abstract

Science communication aims at making key research insights accessible to the broad public. If explanatory and exploratory visualization techniques are combined to do so, the approach is also referred to as exploranation. In this context, the audience is usually not required to have domain expertise. However, we show that exploranation can not only support the communication between researchers and a broad audience, but also between researchers directly. With the goal of communicating an existing method for conducting causal inference on spatio-temporal conflict event data, we investigated how to perform exploranation for experts, i.e., expert exploranation. Based on application scenarios of the inference method, we developed three versions of an interactive visual story to explain the method to conflict researchers. We abstracted the corresponding design process and evaluated the stories both with experts who were unfamiliar with the explained method and experts who were already familiar with it. The positive and extensive feedback from the evaluation shows that expert exploranation is a promising direction for visual storytelling, as it can help to improve scientific outreach, methodological understanding, and accessibility for researchers new to a field.