Tools for Data Stories

This paper describes a set of tools developed to explore the space of direct manipulation tools for annotation of webbased interactive graphics which have become increasingly common in journalism and media. Examples of interactive graphics using the D3 library were collected from the web, and a Google Chrome extension was developed to allow end users without programming knowledge to link their own text or other text on a page with interaction events in these visualizations. The core contributions are the interface for direct manipulation and the approach of injecting scripts to monitor activities in and extract data from the underlying data visualization. An additional tool was developed to allow users to extract the data bound to D3 elements using a similar direct manipulation approach.