A Characterization of Interactive Visual Data Stories With a Spatio-Temporal Context

Large-scale issues with a spatial and temporal context such as the COVID-19 pandemic, the war against Ukraine, and climate change have given visual storytelling with data a lot of attention in online journalism, confirming its high effectiveness and relevance for conveying stories. Thus, new ways have emerged that expand the space of visual storytelling techniques. However, interactive visual data stories with a spatio-temporal context have not been extensively studied yet. Particularly quantitative information about the used layout and media, the visual storytelling techniques, and the visual encoding of space-time is relevant to get a deeper understanding of how such stories are commonly built to convey complex information in a comprehensible way. Covering these three aspects, we propose a design space derived by merging and adjusting existing approaches, which we used to categorize 130 collected web-based visual data stories with a spatio-temporal context from between 2018 and 2022. An analyzis of the collected data reveals the power of large-scale issues to shape the landscape of storytelling techniques and a trend towards a simplified consumability of stories. Taken together, our findings can serve story authors as inspiration regarding which storytelling techniques to include in their own spatio-temporal data stories.