Towards a conceptual model for data narratives

Faten El Outa, Matteo Francia,Patrick Marcel, Veronika Peralta, Panos Vassiliadis.

Summary

Data narration is the activity of producing stories supported by facts extracted from data analysis, possibly using interactive visualizations. In spite of the increasing interest in data narration in several communities (e.g. journalism, business, e-government), there is no consensual definition of data narrative, let alone a conceptual or logical model of it. In this paper, we propose a conceptual model of data narrative for exploratory data analysis. It is based on four layers that reflect the transition from raw data to the visual rendering of the data story: factual, intentional, structural and presentational. This model aims to support the entire lifecycle of building a data narrative, starting from an intentional goal: fetch and explore data, bring out highlights, derive important messages, structure the plot of the data narrative, and render it in a visual manner. Our contributions include a description of the model and its instantiation for several real examples showing that it covers data narration needs.

Texts

Faten El Outa, Matteo Francia,Patrick Marcel, Veronika Peralta, Panos Vassiliadis. Towards a conceptual model for data narratives. 39th International Conference on Conceptual Modeling (ER 2020), 3-6 November 2020, Vienna, Austria.

Local copy of the ER'20 paper (PDF)

Faten El Outa, Matteo Francia, Patrick Marcel, Veronika Peralta, Panos Vassiliadis. Supporting the Generation of Data Narratives. ER Forum, Demo and Posters 2020 co-located with 39th International Conference on Conceptual Modeling (ER 2020), 3-6 November 2020, Vienna, Austria. CEUR proceedings, pp. 168-172

Demo paper, see below for source code

Material

A teaser as well as a more detailed presentation of the paper:

The Code of the data narration prototype is available as Free Open Source Software.

Don't Forget

Please visit Faten's youtube channel for more details on her work.

Please visit my page on a paradigm shift for OLAP for a full description of the saga for a new OLAP.