Storytelling with Social Data

The business world is getting increasingly dynamic and inseparable from social data. Accordingly, organizations that are unable to use and understand the social data in a smart way will miss various knowledge and insight generated from their customers and stakeholders. In this context, understanding social data can be challenging as the analysis goal can be subjective, i.e., it depends on the analyst’s perspective. One of the main challenges in this domain is to transform social data into actionable insights. Therefore, storytelling with social data can be considered an appropriate metaphor as it facilitates understanding and surfacing insights embedded within the data. A story will combine data with narratives to reduce the ambiguity of data, connect data with the context, and describe a specific interpretation. This chapter focuses on the research problem of ‘understanding the social data’ in general and, more particularly, the curation, summarization, and presentation of large amounts of social data. The goal is to enable intelligent narrative construction based on the important features and enable storytelling at multiple levels and from different views using novel summarization techniques.