iStory: intelligent storytelling with social data

The production of knowledge from ever increasing amount of social data is seen by many organizations as an increasingly important capability that can complement the traditional analytics sources. Examples include extracting knowledge and deriving insights from social data to improve government services, predict intelligence activities, personalize the advertisements in elections and improve national security and public health. Understanding social data can be challenging as the analysis goal can be subjective. In this context, storytelling is considered as an appropriate metaphor as it facilitates understanding and surfacing insights which is embedded within the data. In this paper, we focus 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 (extracted and ranked automatically) and enable storytelling at multiple levels and from different views using novel summarization techniques. We implement an interactive storytelling dashboard, namely iStory, and focus on a motivating scenario for analyzing Urban Social Issues from Twitter as it relates to the Australian Government Budget, to highlight how storytelling can significantly facilitate understanding social data.