Storytelling and Visualization

The literature in this category addresses an important but less developed research topic, namely user engagement. In other words, who do we engage with storytelling and how can we engage an audience?

Mahyar et al. address how prior research in different domains define and measure user engagement. They discuss existing frameworks for engagement from other related fields and propose a taxonomy based on previous frameworks for information visualization.

They present five levels of user engagement in information visualization. See Figure 12.

Figure 12. Mahyar et al. present five levels of user engagement in information visualization.

1. Expose (Viewing): the user understands how to read and interact with the data.
2. Involve (Interacting): the user interacts with the visualization and manipulates the data.
3. Analyze (Finding trend): the user analyze the data, finds trends, and outliers.
4. Synthesize (Testing Hypotheses): the user is able to form and evaluate hypotheses.
5. Decide (Deriving Decisions): the user is able to make decisions and draw conclusions based on evaluations of different hypotheses.
   

Their work is based on previous work of Bloom's taxonomy and adapts it to information visualization.

User Engagement for User-Directed Visualization

The literature in this subsection focuses on interactive, user-driven visualization for user engagement. Engagement specifically focuses on each user's investment in the exploration of a visualization. Boy et al. use low-level user interaction e.g., the number of interactions with a visualization that impact the display to quantify user engagement. They present the results of three web-based field experiments, and evaluate the impact of using initial narrative visualization techniques and storytelling on user-engagement with exploratory information visualizations. The main contribution of their work include: the design of three web-based experiments on user-engagement information visualizations. They hypothesize narrative elements should effectively engage the user in exploration of data and analysis the result. They conclude that storytelling does not help engage users in visualizing their experiments.
Boy et al is based on previous work on narrative visualization and user-centred metrics. The negative outcome of their study clearly indicates that more future work is needed to investigate whether or not storytelling increases user engagement.