The New Aesthetic of Data Narrative

Abstract

How can a data-driven visualization tell multiple interplaying stories and achieve a viable result in an abstract visual composition? How can we provide multi-levels of investigation of a certain phenomenon in a paper-based data visualization as if it were an interactive piece (article) where readers can lose themselves? This article relies on a series of exploratory data visualizations originally published for La Lettura, the Sunday cultural supplement of Corriere della Sera with my team at Accurat. Purposely, we here aim at delivering rich visual narratives able to maintain the complexity of the data but still making this complexity more accessible and understandable, publishing compound and complex stories told through data visualizations. The contribution will describe how we can imagine to open new perspectives in the newspaper-editorial field and how we can higher aim at educating readers’ eyes to get familiar with new visual ways to convey the richness, the involvement and feelings (being engagement or concern) that we experience in our everyday lives rather than simplifications of the world. This contribution will outline the design process from the very first idea to the final results in different cases, presenting backstage materials such as sketches and intermediate versions and elucidating our personal aims, purposes, and expectations within this exploratory project. It concludes by tracing some final red threads to discover possible new approaches to the aesthetics of data visualization: focusing on how to get inspired from many different disciplines, how to build a personal method and set individual goals, and explaining how we hope our aesthetic and analytic choices can generate new possibilities for ongoing creativity and research in the field. The idea here is to open possible questions rather than providing finite and definitive answers: to ask ourselves how far can we go rather than delimiting the field.