EcoWest Visualizations

The EcoWest framework aimed to facilitate creating stories involving temporal, geographic data. While D3 makes it possible to create highly customized interactive narrative experiences, the skill and time required can be highly prohibitive. This framework aimed to alleviate the problem by providing ready to use components that could be quickly set up and configured for individual stories.

Initial Process

All generalizations, abstractions, and frameworks lose fidelity in some area. It's a tradeoff between custom behavior (harder, but more power) and out-of-the-box functionality (easier, but more constrained). To understand what tradeoffs needed to be made, I first analyzed the type of stories it was designed to tell.

The typical story was a linear narrative with interactive components, such as explorable maps and data visualizations. By brining together linear and non-linear elements, the reader can reacher a deeper understanding of the story. This is a story telling approach often found in video games. A "string of pearls" method of story telling in which pools of interactivity are strung together along a backbone of linear narrative.

Inside each circle the user is able to freely explore the data, but an underlying narrative ties the exploration together. The implementation can be more complex, and the narrative itself may each "pearl of interaction" to jump to another "pearl", or be tied together via multiple narrative backbones. This style of storytelling is what the EcoWest framework aimed to provide.

The framework allows users to step between interactive layers - whether they be map components or visualization components. Information boxes are laid on top of the view to provide context and a narrative backbone. Some individual layers also have their inner exploration layers, such as a map layer showing wildfire spread over time, which fits into a larger narrative about wildfires. Switches in interactivity are all exposed through an event system that can be listened to or triggered for even more custom functionality.

The above example is an early prototype of the example of interweaving narrative and exploration. Users can go forwards or backwards through the story's timeline to discover and better understand the data and underlying messages.

Sharing

Stories are meant to be told. After using the framework to create a story, it should be sharable. These stories are different in nature than typical linear text articles. Because these stories contain interactive elements and differ from traditional stories, it is important to share certain states of the story.

Two primary components of sharing exist:

1. Sharing URLs
2. Embedding the story into another page

Sharing the visualization itself through a URL is how users access it; while embedding the visualization enables content creators to share the story on their own site or include multiple stories together.

URL sharing was facilitated by an explicit share button, as well as the ability to copy the current URL at any time, which would be updated when view state changed.

As users changed the view, or a subsection of the view, the URL updates in response.

When the user explores to a different part of the story, the temporal / time range layer switcher is updated and the URL is changed to reflect the current state.

IFrames

Another goal was to allow embedding of a story into a page with other stories. URL state was one component that made this process easier to control, but the framework's HTML and CSS structure has also to be responsive.

Continued Usage

It is still being used as the basis for developing more interactive stories, with additional progress being made by the incredibly talented pair, David Kroodsma and Geoff McGhee.

Conclusion

By weaving data visualization into narrative, we can create compelling and information-rich stories. Users can gain a broader and deeper understanding of the story by exploring it, by playing with it, in ways they can't with traditional linear and text based stories. The framework succeed in accomplishing its goals and was used to create many rich, compelling stories. One was featured in National Geographic .

Even though I no longer am active in its development, the framework is still being improved upon and used to create even more stories.