Sea of Genes: Combining Animation and Narrative Strategies to Visualize Metagenomic Data for Museums
This work addresses the problem of public science communication in museums, but it is incremental as it builds on existing narrative visualization frameworks.
The study tackled the challenge of presenting complex metagenomic data to museum visitors using narrative visualization, achieving success in communicating microbial behavior but failing to link it to gene expression and having limited success in highlighting scientific use.
We examine the application of narrative strategies to present a complex and unfamiliar metagenomics dataset to the public in a science museum. Our dataset contains information about microbial gene expressions that scientists use to infer the behavior of microbes. This exhibit had three goals: to inform (the) public about microbes' behavior, cycles, and patterns; to link their behavior to the concept of gene expression; and to highlight scientists' use of gene expression data to understand the role of microbes. To address these three goals, we created a visualization with three narrative layers, each layer corresponding to a goal. This study presented us with an opportunity to assess existing frameworks for narrative visualization in a naturalistic setting. We present three successive rounds of design and evaluation of our attempts to engage visitors with complex data through narrative visualization. We highlight our design choices and their underlying rationale based on extant theories. We conclude that a central animation based on a curated dataset could successfully achieve our first goal, i.e., to communicate the aggregate behavior and interactions of microbes. We failed to achieve our second goal and had limited success with the third goal. Overall, this study highlights the challenges of telling multi-layered stories and the need for new frameworks for communicating layered stories in public settings.