Automatic Generation of Unit Visualization-based Scrollytelling for Impromptu Data Facts Delivery

Junhua Lu, Wei Chen, Hui Ye, Jie Wang, Honghui Mei, Yuhui Gu, Yingcai Wu, Xiaolong Luke Zhang, Kwan-Liu Ma

Abstract: Data-driven scrollytelling has become a prevalent way of visual communication because of its comprehensive delivery of perspectives derived from the data. However, creating an expressive scrollytelling story requires both data and design literacy and is time-consuming. As a result, scrollytelling has been mainly used only by professional journalists to disseminate opinions. In this paper, we present an automatic method to generate expressive scrollytelling visualization, which can present easy-to-understand data facts through a carefully arranged sequence of views. The method first enumerates data facts of a given dataset, and scores and organizes them. The facts are further assembled, sequenced into a story, with reader input taken into consideration. Finally, visual graphs, transitions, and text descriptions are generated to synthesize the scrollytelling visualization. In this way, non-professionals can easily explore and share interesting perspectives from selected data attributes and fact types. We demonstrate the effectiveness and usability of our method through both use cases and an in-lab user study.