The paper considers how the integration between visualization and storytelling can make statistical findings more comprehensible and accessible to the general public. Traditional practices for geovisual analytics methods applied to official statistics require tools for greater user participation and an improved user experience. The approach set out in this paper allows the analyst (the author) to communicate with interested readers through visual discoveries captured in snapshots with descriptive text. The paper introduces HTML5 based geovisual analytics tools that facilitate storytelling aimed at producing statistical news content in support of an automatic authoring process. The author simply presses a button to publish the knowledge gained from a visual interactive discovery process within an interactive web context that could more engagingly draw the user into reflections and sometimes change a perspective altogether.

The paper considers how the integration between visualization and storytelling can make statistical findings more comprehensible and accessible to the general public. Traditional practices for geovisual analytics methods applied to official statistics require tools for greater user participation and an improved user experience. The approach set out in this paper allows the analyst (the author) to communicate with interested readers through visual discoveries captured in snapshots with descriptive text. The paper introduces HTML5 based geovisual analytics tools that facilitate storytelling aimed at producing statistical news content in support of an automatic authoring process. The author simply presses a button to publish the knowledge gained from a visual interactive discovery process within an interactive web context that could more engagingly draw the user into reflections and sometimes change a perspective altogether.

Keywords: Geovisual analytics, storytelling, HTML5

A framework and class library (GAV Flash) implemented in Adobe’s ActionScript is introduced, designed with the intention to significantly shorten the time and effort needed to develop customized web-enabled applications for geovisual analytics tasks. Through an atomic layered component architecture, GAV Flash provides a collection of interactive geo- and information visualization representations for exploring high dimensional spaces and extended with motion behavior. Versatile interaction methods are drawn from many data visualization research areas and optimized for dynamic web visualization of spatio-temporal and multivariate data. Based on layered component thinking and the use of programming interface mechanism the GAV Flash architecture is open and facilitates the creation of new or improved versions of existing components so that ideas can be tried out or optimized rapidly in a fully functional environment. Not only is GAV Flash a tool for interactive visualization but also supports storytelling around visual analytics in which visual representations not only serve as a discovery tool for individuals but also as a mean to share stories among users fostering a social style of collaborative data analysis. A mechanism “snapshot” for saving the explorative results of a reasoning process is introduced that aids collaboration and publication of gained insight and knowledge embedded as dynamic visualizations in blogs or web pages with associative metadata or “storytelling”.

It is vital to understand what kind of processes for learning that Geovisual Analytics creates, as certain activities and conditions are produced when employing Geovisual Anlytic tools in education. To understand learning processes created by Geovisual Analytics, first requires an understanding of the interactions between the technology, the workplace where the learning takes place, and learners’ specific knowledge formation. When studying these types of interaction it demands a most critical consideration from theoretical perspectives on research design and methods. This paper first discusses common, and then a more uncommon, theoretical approach used within the fields of learning with multimedia environments and Geovisual Analytics, the socio-cultural theoretical perspective. The paper next advocates this constructivist theoretical and empirical perspective when studying learning with multiple representational Geovisual Analytic tools. To illustrate, an outline of a study made within this theoretical tradition is offered. The study is conducted in an educational setting where the Open Statistics eXplorer platform is used. Discussion of our study results shows that the socio-cultural perspective has much to offer in terms of what kind of understanding can be reached in conducting this kind of studies. Therefore, we argue that empirical research to analyze how specific communities use various Geovisual Analytics to evaluate information is best positioned in a socio-cultural theoretical perspective.(This article belongs to the Special Issue Geovisual Analytics)

The paper focuses on an ancient social ritual: “visual storytelling”—exemplified through telling stories about a country’s development over time that shape its economic growth and well-being. Discoveries are made that draw the user into reflecting on how life is lived—and may be improved—from one region to another. In addition, the user can interactively participate in the web-based process which is important to the education and dissemination of public statistics. A toolkit GAV Flash (geoanalytics visualization) is constructed which is programmed in Adobe’s ActionScript. This is the basis for the statistics information visualization application “World eXplorer”. This uses integrated storytelling and is based on multiple linked views and an integrated database link to the public World dataBank. This has more than 400 performance indicators for the time period 1960–2010. An interactive visual story mechanism assists teachers to improve a student’s knowledge through reflections on how life is lived by using a variety of demographics, such as healthcare, environment, and educational and economic indicators. Educators can develop interactive teaching material based on this storytelling mechanism. Integrated snapshots can be captured at any time during an explorative data analysis process and they become an important component of the analytical reasoning process. Students can access geovisual applications and explore statistical relations on their own guided by the stories prepared by the teachers. With the associated science of perception and cognition in relation to the use of multivariate spatio-temporal statistical data, this paper contributes to the growing interest in geovisual statistics analytics in education.

We introduce a framework and class library (GAV Flash) implemented in Adobe’s ActionScript, designed with the intention to significantly shorten the time and effort needed to develop customized web-enabled applications for visual analytics or geovisual analytics tasks. Through an atomic layered component architecture, GAV Flash provides a collection of common geo- and information visualization representations extended with motion behavior including scatter matrix, extended parallel coordinates, table lens, choropleth map and treemap, integrated in a multiple, time-linked layout. Versatile interaction methods are drawn from many data visualization research areas and optimized for dynamic web visualization of spatio-temporal and multivariate data. Based on layered component thinking and the use of programming interface mechanism the GAV Flash architecture is open and facilitates the creation of new or improved versions of existing components so that ideas can be tried out or optimized rapidly in a fully functional environment. Following the Visual Analytics mantra, a mechanism “snapshot” for saving the explorative results of a reasoning process is developed that aids collaboration and publication of gained insight and knowledge embedded as dynamic visualizations in blogs or web pages with associative metadata or “storytelling”.

The interest for statistics visualization is emerging with the rise of geovisual analytics on the internet. National and sub-national statistics foundations have started to migrate from tabular representations to interactive web-enabled visualizations that can show trends. Interactive web-enable visualizations for movement data (or flow data) such as trade flows or commuting flows, however, are still rare. This paper covers spatial interactions and animation for a wide variety of realized movements of people such as commuting and migration between an origin and a destination visually expressed by directed weighted arrows over a geographic space. The paper is built around an interactive flow map demonstrator that can interactively explore and communicate large spatio-temporal and multivariate statistical flow datasets using bidirectional flow arrows where both in-coming and out-going flows can be clearly shown coordinated and linked with a choropleth map, histogram or parallel coordinates plot. The demonstrator is implemented with low-level components from our geovisual analytics toolkit GAV Flash designed with the intention to shorten the time and effort needed to develop customized web-enabled interactive visualization applications such as the introduced flow map application.

This paper presents a study of how geographic information visualization and Visual Storytelling (geovisual analytics) will be applied in school settings in order to 1) customize the application for educational purpose, 2) improve the teaching in social science and 3) study teachers and students experiences and learning.  - The application “Open Statistics eXplorer” will be used to improve the students knowledge and understanding of sophisticated statistical relations, - Teachers will be able to, individually and together, develop a dynamic teaching material through storytelling, through the web, - Students will be able to, with help of powerful geographical statistics, explore statistical relations on their own. A better understanding of how educators and their students can elicit deeper user understanding and participation by exploiting dynamic web-enabled statistics visualization is of importance. Together with the associated science of perception in learning in relation to the use of multidimensional spatio-temporal statistical data this will contribute to the research fields of geovisual analytics as well as educational science.

The paper focuses on the most ancient of social rituals: “storytelling” – exemplified through telling a geovisual analytics story about a country’s development over time and shape the measure of economic growth and well-being, applied in an educational setting to 1) customize a geovisual analytics application for educational purpose, 2) improve the teaching in social science and 3) study teachers and students experiences and learning. Our tool “World Statistics eXplorer” with a database link to the public World dataBank with more than 400 indicators for 1960-2009 will help to improve the students knowledge and understanding of a variety in national demographics, healthcare, environment and economic structures and their performances over a longer time period. Teachers might be able to, individually and together, develop a dynamic teaching material about the progress in the world through storytelling accessed on the Web. Students will be able to, with help of powerful geographical statistics, explore statistical relations on their own. A better understanding of how educators and their students can elicit deeper user understanding and participation by exploiting dynamic web-enabled statistics visualization is of importance. Together with the associated science of perception and learning in relation to the use of multidimensional spatio-temporal statistical data this will contribute to the research fields of geovisual analytics as well as educational science.