ScrollyVis: Interactive Visual Authoring of Guided Dynamic Narratives for Scientific Scrollytelling

Area of Science:

• Digital Humanities
• Data Visualization
• Scientific Communication

Background:

• Visual stories are powerful tools for public information dissemination.
• Scrollytelling, a web-based technique, uses scrolling for content reveal, offering intuitive user interaction.
• Existing methods lack robust support for integrating diverse data types in scientific narratives.

Purpose of the Study:

• To present a novel approach for authoring, editing, and presenting data-driven scientific narratives using scrollytelling.
• To support flexible integration of various media and specialized visualizations.
• To enable interactive parameter exploration within scrolling narratives.

Main Methods:

• Developed a novel scrollytelling approach for scientific narratives.
• Integrated common sources (images, text, video) and specialized visualizations (interactive maps, scalar fields, mesh data).
• Created an extensible, web-based authoring tool for stand-alone story export.

Main Results:

• Demonstrated scrollytelling's utility for traversing dynamic scientific narratives.
• Showcased integration with interactive parameter exploration.
• Case studies across diverse scientific fields and a user study validated the approach.

Conclusions:

• The proposed scrollytelling method effectively supports authoring and presentation of data-driven scientific stories.
• The system offers a flexible, intuitive, and powerful tool for scientific communication.
• Expert assessment confirmed the usefulness and quality of scrollytelling-generated scientific articles.