In a study executed in 2010, 2 researchers collected examples of data driven and visual news stories in order to detect common patterns in these stories and to describe different genres for these kind of news stories. Although the study is already quite old given the rapid development of tools and techniques for online articles (Scrollytelling wasn’t invented yet at the time, for example), some useful insights can be drawn from the study and its conclusions.
These are the genres the researchers identified.
The magazine style narrative visualisation genre is what can be thought of as the classical way of integrating visualisations into a story.
The bulk of the story is written text, in which the visualisations are embedded so support or complement the written narrative. This format is very popular both in print and online, and mainly uses static visualisations, or visualisations with only limited interactivity.
The narrative power of adding visual and textual annotations is described in the Visual annotations and Text annotations modules. The researchers recognised this power by identifying the annotated chart as a separate genre.
Annotated charts will have only a limited amount of surrounding text and use a visualisation as the canvas for the annotations, which are the building blocks of the narrative.
A page from the Nederlands Dagblad newspaper explaining the effects of lockdown measures on mobility in different parts of the Netherlands (shops, parks and beaches, residential areas, ...). The annotations on the chart tell the story, and the text below the graphic only explains how to read the chart and where the data comes from. Source: @SjoerdMouissie
You can find more examples of the annotated chart genre in the Annotation stories section of the Text annotations module.
Partitioned posters can contain very limited or even no data visualisations at all when they illustrate concepts and ideas instead of data. They used to be very popular and were often called “infographics”.
Part of newspaper page explaining how whales dive and feed themselves. Data visualisation, illustration and text are combined with series of panels. Source: nytimes.com
Source: How the Supply Chain Crisis Unfolded, nytimes.com
A comic strip is related to a partitioned poster, but the panels have a much stricter layout, so that the reading order is much more linear.
Recently, the genre of the data comics has emerged as a study area in visualisation research. Publications on the topic as well as a gallery with examples can be found at datacomics.github.io.
A data comic on the average time use of Americans. Source: Matt Hong
Slide shows are sequences of visualisations, each with a some explanatory text. The slides are put one after the other to build up the story, and transitions between slides can be faded or animated.
How Belgium’s heating up explains climate change visible in Belgian meteorological data. Source: Maarten Lambrechts
Media used to publish a lot of slide shows with buttons and other controls that users needed to interact with to advance the story. But analytics showed that only a small share of users used these controls, and that “users just want to scroll”. So today, slide shows have become rare in media. They are mostly replaced with traditional magazine style formats, with text and visualisations alternating, or with scrollytelling formats (see the Scrollytelling module).