Capture & Analysis of Active Reading Behaviors for Interactive Articles on the Web

Abstract

Journalists, educators, and technical writers are increasingly publishing interactive content on the web. However, popular analytics tools provide only coarse information about how readers interact with individual pages, and laboratory studies often fail to capture the variability of a real‐world audience. We contribute extensions to the Idyll markup language to automate the detailed instrumentation of interactive articles and corresponding visual analysis tools for inspecting reader behavior at both micro‐ and macro‐levels. We present three case studies of interactive articles that were instrumented, posted online, and promoted via social media to reach broad audiences, and share data from over 50,000 reader sessions. We demonstrate the use of our tools to characterize article‐specific interaction patterns, compare behavior across desktop and mobile devices, and reveal reading patterns common across articles. Our contributed findings, tools, and corpus of behavioral data can help advance and inform more comprehensive studies of narrative visualization.

The Public Life of Data: Investigating Reactions to Visualizations on Reddit

“…Developing a framework of different reaction types can Some user engagement can be measured more easily, e.g,. from interaction logs, questionnaires, and observations [3,15,32,37]. For example, prior studies [32,33,38] report on observations on how general audiences engage with visualizations in co-located and real-world settings.…”

Chimera

“…Further, due to the sheer volume of information available and variability of the search, audience searches are typically incomplete. [14].…”

Learning From Science News via Interactive and Animated Data Visualizations: An Investigation Combining Eye Tracking, Online Survey, and Cued Retrospective Reporting

“…With an interactive visualization, users have more control over the flow of information, which can lead to selective scanning, matching on content that is believed to be most interesting or important (Herring et al, 2017). In their study on reading activities on interactive online articles, Conlen et al (2019) report that users show a continuum of behaviors, ranging from linearly interacting with the content to interacting only with specific article components, likely based on personal relevance. They assume that, in general, users are willing to engage with interactive content but only if it is crucial to the central storyline.…”

“…Today’s multimodal online news environment facilitates a great variety of self-determined and discontinuous patterns of news consumption (Conlen et al, 2019; Holsanova et al, 2006). Drawing on action-centered theories of media use (Renckstorf & Wester, 2001), we thus conceptualize news reading as an active, reciprocal process of attention, selection, and interpretation, guided by two competing mechanisms—salience and schema (Bucher & Schumacher, 2006; Kaspar, 2013).…”