IEEE VIS 2023VisComm Workshop
Exploring Annotation Strategies in Professional Visualizations
Insights from Prominent News Portals
Annotations are how a chart directs attention: a shaded band, an arrow, a line of text, a number set in bold. To see how professionals use them, we gathered 72 annotated static charts from The New York Times, The Economist, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post and read each one closely: which annotations it uses, how they combine, how much they say, and how they line up with the caption. Five strategies kept coming back.
Five strategies
Each strategy is shown on a chart the paper discusses under it. The circled numbers in warm ink are ours: they point at the annotations doing the work.
The nine charts
Every chart the paper shows. Open one for its caption, what the paper says about it, and what to look for.
How the study worked
Sections 3 and 4 of the paper. All the charts and data are on OSF.
Building the corpus
-
118
Charts with some form of annotation, chosen by hand from the graphics sections of the four portals, with the annotation design space as a guide. None are from 2017 or earlier.
-
Bar charts, line charts, and scatterplots only. Most charts were one of the three; the few that were not were removed.
-
Static charts only. Charts with dynamic components were excluded.
-
72
Professionally designed static charts with annotations, the corpus the paper analyzes.
What was analyzed
- The annotation types in each chart, and how often each appears.
- How many distinct annotations each chart uses.
- Combinations of annotations, called ensembles, and how varied they are.
- How much text is used: low for single words, medium for phrases, high for complete sentences.
- How each caption relates to the annotations, read against the article it ran with.
- Notes on how the annotations and ensembles work in each chart's context.
Seven annotation types
The charts were coded with the annotation types of the authors' earlier design space (Rahman et al.).
Balancing complexity
“Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.”
Einstein, as quoted in the paper's discussion
The professionals simplified complex information without oversimplifying it. They highlighted only the part of a chart the article needed, and kept text to the article's central idea rather than loading the chart with detail. The paper reads this as mindful attention to cognitive load, while noting that it did not evaluate the designers' intentions directly.
What this study does not show
- Only static charts were studied; interactive and dynamic visualizations need further work.
- The effectiveness of the strategies was not assessed directly, and it may vary with the scenario and the audience.
- There was no direct input from the professionals who made the charts.
The paper names interviews with visualization professionals as a next step. A later study by the same authors takes it: Designing Annotations in Visualization.
Cite the paper
Md Dilshadur Rahman, Ghulam Jilani Quadri, and Paul Rosen. Exploring Annotation Strategies in Professional Visualizations: Insights from Prominent US News Portals. IEEE VIS Workshop on Visualization for Communication (VisComm), 2023. doi:10.31219/osf.io/fd8zj
All the charts and data are on OSF. The paper was presented at the VisComm 2023 workshop.
@inproceedings{rahman2023exploring,
author = {Rahman, Md Dilshadur and
Quadri, Ghulam Jilani and Rosen, Paul},
title = {Exploring Annotation Strategies in
Professional Visualizations: Insights
from Prominent US News Portals},
booktitle = {IEEE VIS Workshop on Visualization
for Communication (VisComm)},
year = {2023},
doi = {10.31219/osf.io/fd8zj}
}