Edinburgh Napier University

  In this paper, we explore graph comics as a medium to communicate
changes in dynamic networks. While previous research
has focused on visualizing dynamic networks for data
exploration, we want to see if we can take advantage of the
visual expressiveness and familiarity of comics to present and
explain temporal changes in networks to an audience. To understand
the potential of comics as a storytelling medium, we
first created a variety of comics during a 3 month structured
design process, involving domain experts from public education
and neuroscience. This process led to the definition of 8
design factors for creating graph comics and propose design
solutions for each. Results from a qualitative study suggest
that a general audience is quickly able understand complex
temporal changes through graph comics, provided with minimal
textual annotations and no training.