We present Research Narratives that came out of a vision to have an environment that encourages responsible use of data for research and communication. It is a tool that provides a collaborative environment for multidisciplinary research or writing projects that communicate patterns from data.
We live amidst a data deluge: Many of us use or aspire to use data for various purposes — to understand, to describe or to predict. Data could be thought of as a simplified and selective representation of a complex process. What information a dataset contains is entirely dependent on what was measured, how and for what purpose. A thorough understanding of this context is necessary for doing meaningful data analysis or interpretation. Research Narratives aims to enable communities of researchers and authors to create and explore linked resource repositories that are richly annotated with all the relevant contextual information. This helps develop the sensibility and prudence in the community to decide what the data can possibly say and what it cannot.
Currently, the tool is at a proof of concept stage. It can be used to weave complex geospatial data operations into interactive data story-like representations, allowing new entrants to explore data storytelling. At the core is an interface to explore and understand relationships among resources in a deeply ‘semantic’ and intuitive manner, which currently takes the form of mind maps. Users draw visual connections and define relationships between annotations from varied sources. Finally, the authoring interface provides a template to put together the components of a story in a narrative sequence and share it with the community or exported.
The need to enable multidisciplinary data stories from various communities - students, journalists or researchers is what drives this project. We are excited to understand and navigate the challenges of building a great user experience for collaborative data discovery, annotation, exploration and sharing.
This project was built initially as part of an internship at the Urban Informatics Lab of the Indian Institute for Human Settlements.
Research Narratives: https://researchnarratives.netlify.app