Compendia: Automated visual storytelling generation from online article collection

Publication Type

Journal Article

Version

publishedVersion

Publication Date

1-2026

Abstract

In the digital age, readers value quantitative journalism that is clear, concise, analytical, and humancentred. To understand complex topics, they often piece together scattered facts from multiple articles. Visual storytelling can transform fragmented information into clear, engaging narratives, yet its use with unstructured online articles remains largely unexplored. To fill this gap, we present Compendia, an automated system that analyzes online articles in response to a user’s query and generates a coherent data story tailored to the user’s informational needs. Compendia addresses key challenges of storytelling from unstructured text through two modules covering: Online Article Retrieval, which gathers relevant articles; Data Fact Extraction, which identifies, validates, and refines quantitative facts; Fact Organization, which clusters and merges related facts into coherent thematic groups; and Visual Storytelling, which transforms the organized facts into narratives with visualizations in an interactive scrollytelling interface. We evaluated Compendia through a quantitative analysis, confirming the accuracy in fact extraction and organization, and through two user studies with 16 participants, demonstrating its usability, effectiveness, and ability to produce engaging visual stories for open-ended queries.

Keywords

Data Storytelling, Scrollytelling, Text/Document Data

Discipline

Databases and Information Systems

Publication

IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics

Volume

32

Issue

7

First Page

5183

Last Page

5197

ISSN

1077-2626

Identifier

10.1109/TVCG.2026.3663204

Publisher

Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers

Additional URL

https://doi.org/10.1109/TVCG.2026.3663204

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