BONNIE: Building Online Narratives from Noteworthy Interaction Events

Abstract

After a sensemaking process using a visual analytics application, a major challenge is to filter the essential information that led to a discovery and to communicate the findings to other people. We propose to take advantage of the interaction trace left by the exploratory data analysis, presenting it with a novel visualization to aid in this process. With the trace, the user can choose the desired noteworthy interaction steps and create a visual narrative of his/her own interaction, sharing the acquired knowledge with readers. To achieve our goal, we have developed the BONNIE (Building Online Narratives from Noteworthy Interaction Events) framework. It comprises a log model to register the interaction events and a visualization environment for users to view their own interaction history and to build their visual narratives. This paper presents our proposal for communicating discoveries in visual analytics applications, the BONNIE visualization environment, and an empirical study we conducted to evaluate our solution.