Coupling Story to Visualization: Using Textual Analysis as a Bridge Between Data and Interpretation

Online writers and journalism media are increasingly combining visualization and text to create narrative visualizations. Often, however, the two tasks are carried out independently of one another. We propose an approach to automatically and deeply integrate text and visualization elements. We begin with a writer's story that presumably can be supported through substantial data evidence. We leverage natural language processing, quantitative narrative analysis, and information visualization to (1) automatically extract narrative components (who, what, when, where) from data-rich stories, and (2) integrate the supporting data evidence with the text to develop a narrative visualization. We also introduce interactive deep coupling to facilitate bidirectional interaction from text to visualization and visualization to text. We demonstrate the approach with a case study in the data-rich field of sports journalism.