Exploring Annotation Strategies In Professional Visualizations: Insights From Prominent US News Portals

Annotations play a vital role in visualizations, providing valuable insights and focusing attention on critical visual elements. This study analyzes a curated corpus of 72 professionally designed static charts with annotations from prominent US news portals including The New York Times, The Economists, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post. The analysis employed a qualitative approach involving identifying annotation types, assessing their frequency, exploring annotation combinations, categorizing text quantity, and examining the relationship between chart captions and annotations. The analysis reveals common patterns in annotation strategies used by professionals, including extensive use of annotations aligned with chart captions, targeted highlighting and descriptive text within charts, strategic utilization of multiple annotations as ensembles, and emphasis on article-related numerical values. These findings provide valuable guidance for improving annotation practices, tools, and methodologies, enhancing data comprehension and communication in visualizations.

Md Dilshadur Rahman, Ghulam Jilani Quadri, and Paul Rosen. Exploring Annotation Strategies In Professional Visualizations: Insights From Prominent US News Portals. Visualization for Communication (VisComm), 2023.

@inproceedings{rahman2023proanno,
  title = {Exploring Annotation Strategies in Professional Visualizations: Insights from
    Prominent {US} News Portals},
  author = {Rahman, Md Dilshadur and Quadri, Ghulam Jilani and Rosen, Paul},
  booktitle = {Visualization for Communication (VisComm)},
  year = {2023},
  abstract = {Annotations play a vital role in visualizations, providing valuable
    insights and focusing attention on critical visual elements. This study analyzes a
    curated corpus of 72 professionally designed static charts with annotations from
    prominent US news portals including The New York Times, The Economists, The Wall Street
    Journal, and The Washington Post. The analysis employed a qualitative approach involving
    identifying annotation types, assessing their frequency, exploring annotation
    combinations, categorizing text quantity, and examining the relationship between chart
    captions and annotations. The analysis reveals common patterns in annotation strategies
    used by professionals, including extensive use of annotations aligned with chart
    captions, targeted highlighting and descriptive text within charts, strategic
    utilization of multiple annotations as ensembles, and emphasis on article-related
    numerical values. These findings provide valuable guidance for improving annotation
    practices, tools, and methodologies, enhancing data comprehension and communication in
    visualizations.}
}