Process

Process

Teaching people how to make data comics. There are several approaches:

• Start with the story This can be a text or a story people invent themselves. We have some example stories, that can be altered by a teacher or the participants themselves: Data Stories (data stories). Stories should be short, not longer.In this case, narration involves the sequence of messages, arguments and data points. Also, building a plot of introduction, middle and end are required for a complete script. Furthermore, the optical data representation should depend on the messages, it conveys and follows the principles of making data visualisation. Ultimately, for this stage, the outcomes could be a coherent story in a text with visualisation of involved data sets.

• Start with data To begin with data, an author would firstly extract insight and clarify the logical relationship among data sets and then highlight important details and notable changes. On the other side, if an author has message first, the next step should be collecting relevant data then sift them. At the stage of analysis，objectivity and scientific nature of the original data should be respected.

Storyboard The stage of Storyboard is about the flow among narrate pieces. A flow defines the way an audience reading through the comic (McCloud, 1994). A well-designed flow provides viewers with intuitive and transparent reading experience. To achieve this goal, we could start from making comic fragments for each piece of messages, and arrange panels on pages as well as elements within a panel. Pictures and text should be combined in a balanced way and provide evidence in data. Alternatively, Data Comic Patterns offered in this section may be auxiliary for building the structure of the work.

Structure The structure in this context defines the layout of contents and transitions among panels. Cohn and Campbell (2015, p.194) present five kinds of layouts for general comics (grid, blockage, staggering, separation and overlap) which, are possibly grafted with success on Data Comics. Data Comics Patterns then localise these transitions and layouts for data dissemination particularly. Coherent transitions connect messages smoothly so that we have logical consistency and clarity. Additionally, placement of elements should also be taken into consideration, in this stage, the work may experience several iterations, to ensure close connections between panels; and ensure viewers could easily get the message from each panel and understand the whole story.

Target Audience, Scenarios and Medium The external factors (target audience, scenario and medium) play essential roles in the process of Data Comics making. In fact, we should keep these three factors in mind from start to finish. The target audience could be people who care this kind of information or to whom the author wants to convey the message. Similarly, before making data visualisations, it is crucial to know that whom the author is creating visualisations for, and what the visualisations need to convey (Smiciklas, 2012). Therefore, it is a prerequisite to identify the information that audience may want to get out of it; whether the structure or plot could be acceptable to this group of people. Besides, the viewing scenario and the medium carrying Data Comics also affect the structure of the work when making design choices. For example, infinite pages (long pages) only work in electronic devices (i.e. mobile phones or computers). While the poster comic presented on single page merely fits it properly in public spaces. The whole process is highly human-centred, once the work is complete, it may need to be refined by doing readability test with two or three target audience.