Introduction

The ancient social ritual: "visual storytelling" - is exemplified through telling stories with Statistics eXplorer. Stories are made by the analyst in Statistical eXplorer that draws us into reflecting on important discoveries and knowledge and is important to the education and dissemination of public statistics. Colleagues of the analyst can also participate in this collaborative storytelling process reaching joined consensus and trust. The Statistics Publishing generates Vislets (small web-enabled visualizations) developed for two programming environments; Adobe's ActionScript and HTML5 with JavaScript providing innovative interactive means of making sense of spatio-temporal and multi-dimensional data. The story mechanism assists the analyst and author to improve the public's knowledge through important reflections on a variety of demographics, such as healthcare, environment, and educational and economic indicators. Analysts can also develop interactive educational material based on this storytelling mechanism. Integrated snapshots can be captured at any time during an explorative data analysis process and they become an important component of the analytical reasoning process. The public can access geovisual applications and explore statistical relations on their own guided by the stories prepared by the authors.

The conceptual approach and framework of the geovisual analytics storytelling implementation is based around three complementary characteristics: eXplorer, tell-a-story and Publisher (Vislet):

-Authoring (eXplorer): data provider and manager, motion visual representations including choropleth map, scatter plot, table lens, parallel axes, time graph, data grid, coordinated views, map layers, analytic tools (dynamic query, filter, regional categorization, profiles, highlight), and dynamic colour scale.

-Tell-a-story: snapshot mechanism that captures an interactive scenario (active views and indicators, attributes, time step, regions), metadata with hyperlinks, story and chapters, edit, capture, save, and export story.

-Publisher (Vislet): import stories and create HTML code for embeddable interactive motion visual representations for publishing on a web site or blog.

Step 1

Load the indicators and select the time span for the data to be used in the Vislet. This is done by selecting "Manage Data" under the "File" menu.

Click here to read more about Data Management.

Step 2

Add snapshots and story text using the Story editor. Story text consists of a title, name of the author, name of the organisation, the titles of chapters avaliable, and the Chapter text for each chapter. Multiple chapters can be used for example to cover multiple angles of the same story.

A snapshot is defined as a saved setting of view, filtering, selected items etc. This is meant to enhance the storytelling of your story. As shown below you can create a link that refers to a snapshot by using the Link function. For example you can refer to a specific year by creating a link with a snapshot with the timeline component set to the correct year.

Click here to read more about Storytelling or Stories.

Step 3

Export the Storyfile. By using the Export function in Statistics eXplorer you can export your story file to an XML-file to be read by Statistics Publisher.

Step 4

Load your story file gained from Statistics eXplorer to Statistics Publisher. This will give you a number of options to setup the layout, what visualization component or linked components to use and the general layout of the composed Vislet. In this example below we use three linked components choropleth map, motion scatter plot and dynamic Bar Chart. We have also chosen the option not to inclde the metadata but use snapshots boxes embedded in the Vislet that are referred to in the HTML text. The size of the widget is set to 650 pixels.

Click here to read more about Statistics Publisher.

Step 5

Create a Web page where the Vislet should be embedded. This can be anything from a public blog-service or your own homepage.

Step 6

Edit your web page. Go to where you add HTML code, and paste the HTML code from the HTML-snippet window in Statistics Publisher.

Try this example for yourself, just use the code in the textarea below on your own homepage or blog:

Step 7

Publish the code and view the result. Below is an embedded Vislet. It is fully interactive and contains only the data chosen by the creator in the Story. In this Story and Vislet we have used five indicators; Population Total, Population Growth, Population ages 0-14, ages 15-64 and ages 65 and above. You can select these indicators in the Choropleth map, the scatter plot and the Bar Chart through the drop-down lists. The Vislet and text below was created by prof. Mikael Jern and is a good example of a composed Vislet.

Add a Vislet to a Homepage or Blog