Evaluating Data Storytelling Strategies: A Case Study on Urban Changes

摘要

Understanding urban changes is important for both citizens and administrations from several perspectives, ranging from the monitoring of the territorial development in the long run, to the support to business decision making, and to the people involvement in the administration policy. Data storytelling plays a big role in explaining both the factors involved in this complex phenomena and the effects that administration choices have on the territory. This work aims to compare the communication power of different data storytelling strategies using "semantic" language (newspaper articles) and "perceptive" language (maps) in the context of urban changes. The study focuses on the cognitive strategies that human beings apply to process perceptive and semantic information. In particular, we compare the ability of two groups of users to understand and to recall information about the metamorphosis of the Italian city of Turin after the XX Olympic Winter Games competition in 2006. The same information about the city has been provided through infographics to the first group and through newspaper articles to the second one. Both users' groups have been observing the information support for the same interval of time. The fruition strategies of the users have been observed by means of an eye tracker device, while the comprehension of the information has been verified using a questionnaire. The experiments show that, within fixed time constraints, the users provided with infographics gain a deeper understanding and a better ability of recall the represented phenomenon then the others. Further results about the comparison of the view patterns on the different types of information support are documented.