GameViews: Understanding and Supporting Data-driven Sports Storytelling

Various stakeholders in the sports domain rely on the analysis and presentation of sports data to derive insights. In particular, sportswriters construct game stories using statistical information; fans share their viewpoints based on the real-time stats while watching the game. In this paper, we explore how these stakeholders construct data-driven sports stories. We began by observing a sportswriter, then analyzed published sports stories, and characterized 1500 fan comments about particular sporting events. We found that their story needs were similar in some respects while quite different in others. Based on the findings, we implemented two exploratory prototypes: GameViews-Writers for sportswriters to quickly extract key game information and GameViews-Fans to support a real-time data-driven game-viewing experience for fans. We report insights from two user studies conducted with four professional sportswriters and eight sports fans, respectively. We discuss the results of these studies and present several avenues for future work.