Narrating regions : new storytelling technique helps increasing people's analysis and information sharing

Sound information at sub-national level and benchmarking of regions across national borders has increased in importance in the policy agenda of many countries due to higher integration driven by institutional processes and economic globalisation. Geovisual analytics techniques help illustrating complex data such as regional, spatiotemporal and multidimensional statistics. Interactive time-linked visual representations enable the users to simultaneously analyse relations among different variables. "OECD eXplorer", developed by NCVA in collaboration with OECD, is today a worldwide recognized web-enabled tool for visualizing and better understanding the socio-economic structure of OECD regions and their performance over time. Geovisual Analytics in the OECD explorer has so far focused more on tools to analyse regional economic performance than on methods that efficiently publish gained knowledge. Publication is indeed part of the analytical process and it could become a catalyst for discussion generating new value in a social setting. In this context, we introduce a novel storytelling that supports the editorial authoring process with the goal to advance technology critical to the sharing of information and publishing. With the introduction of this new technique, we are moving away from a clear distinction between authors and readers: The analyst can discuss with interested readers the visual discoveries which have been captured into snapshots together with descriptive text and hyperlinks. The author gets feedback from colleagues, adapts the story and publishes it using a "Vislet" that is embedded in blogs or wikis. This advanced storytelling technology applied to OECD eXplorer can therefore become a complete on-line publication to highlight recent trends and relevant disparities among OECD regions.