Interactions - January/February 2010

out on subsequent tellings, the source of the derivation remains clear. This process also supports the democratic notion of back-ing up a claim with evidence. In exactly the same way, the visualization interface must emphasize the original visualization and its intention, yet support derivations. This process is called annotation.

A means of capturing these story annotations will retain the benefit of the community-driven storytelling process around the visualization. Just as the original visualization is a capture of the underlying data set, subsequent versions of the visualization also must be captured and attached to preserve the original message but at the same time allow the breadth that comes of continued discussion. So another part of the model is building processes into the interface that allow annotations to be preserved, commented on, and subsequently reviewed by other members of the community. It is this process within the framework that provides shared storytelling through visualization with the ability to create knowledge artifacts around data. The process is called snapshot, and with this, extra data created around the visualization is preserved.

Significant amounts of data
can be generated because the
entire process of shared sto-
rytelling through visualiza-
tion is a life cycle that repeats
infinitely. The framework gives
data visualization a life force
by providing it with an identity
that enables it to exist within an
object-centered social network
and making it an interface so
that people can interact with it
to begin a shared storytelling
experience. As data becomes
increasingly prevalent on the
World Wide Web, the ability to
engage with a communal visu-
alization of a data set is a more
useful experience than new
methods of visualizing data. For
designers, this is a change in
approach toward visualization;
no longer is it about making the
most visually appealing and
sophisticated representations.
Instead, this creativity should
be constrained to reverting the
control of data to people and
providing a good experience
along the way. With these tech-
nologies, it’s impossible to imag-
ine how many important stories
will be told by groups of like-
minded people in the future.

with government. If you’re interested
in finding out about the framework
in more detail we’ve published it as a
series of interaction design patterns
at http://socialvizpatterns.info.
Acknowledgements
This research was conducted within
the Australasian CRC for Interaction
Design, which is established and
supported under the Australian
Government’s Cooperative Research
Centres Program.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS Jeremy Yuille is an interaction designer, digital media artist, and academic with a background in digital art,

music, performance, and architecture. He has a bachelor’s of design studies from the architecture department of the University of Queensland and a master’s of design from SIAL at RMIT University. Yuille is a cofounder of the Media and Communication Design Studio at RMIT, where he undertakes collaborative research with the Australasian CRC for Interaction Design (ACID), supervises postgraduate students, and holds interaction design studios. He is also a certified ScrumMaster and a director of the Interaction Design Association. He infrequently blogs on design and the progress of his Ph.D. at http://isomorpho.us.

Postscript

In this article we’ve discussed how
the framework for an interface
encourages social interactions around
data visualization, which we’ve
proposed, can be used with open
data, to encourage transparency and
enhance community engagement

Hugh Macdonald is a
research assistant on the
ACID Loupe Project and
has been researching infor-
mation visualization and
theories of social interac-
tion design. He is also currently a Ph.D.
student at the School of Media and
Communication at RMIT University in
Melbourne, Australia. His research involves
how the emergence of networked media,
along with its technologies and social prac-
tices, is changing the way professional
sporting organizations and sports fans
interact with each other within the media
landscape. Macdonald also maintains a
keen interest in mobile technologies, hav-
ing previously worked in this area and
received a related master’s degree. He is
currently looking at some of the social
effects of these technologies.