In the era of big data, the amount of digital information is growing at a tremendous rate. The past few years have seen major advances in data visualization and visual analytics systems for exploratory data analysis. However, the increasing complexity of data has posed new challenges to effective communication of data insights to a general audience. To convey data insights effectively, narrative visualization has been designed and created by practitioners in the forms of data journalisms, interactive data reports, and so on. However, most existing narrative visualizations are crafted by graphical designers and visualization experts through graphical design tools or programming languages. Therefore, it is very hard and time-consuming to generate or author visual data stories.

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In the era of big data, the amount of digital information is growing at a tremendous rate. The past few years have seen major advances in data visualization and visual analytics systems for exploratory data analysis. However, the increasing complexity of data has posed new challenges to effective communication of data insights to a general audience. To convey data insights effectively, narrative visualization has been designed and created by practitioners in the forms of data journalisms, interactive data reports, and so on. However, most existing narrative visualizations are crafted by graphical designers and visualization experts through graphical design tools or programming languages. Therefore, it is very hard and time-consuming to generate or author visual data stories.

To address this challenge, we present visual data storytelling techniques and systems to ease the generation and authoring of narrative visualization, and to enhance data insight communication. Specifically, we design an interactive visualization system that can generate interactive slides with a narrative structure from academic papers to improve users’ paper-reading experience; we develop animated narrative visualization to present video clickstream data to guide the user’s attention to patterns and anomalies in the data; and we introduce InfoNice, a visualization design tool that facilitates users to easily create data-driven infographics for storytelling. We have conducted various user studies to demonstrate the effectiveness of our systems and techniques for data insight communication.