As the story format becomes a popular digital marketing technique, one tool to complement it will be data visualization–as can be seen by General Electric and Visualizing.org's recent project in which they scanned in 6,000 pages of GE’s annual reports to build an interactive visualization of the company’s history.
The end result is a history of GE from 1892 until 2011. The image also lets users search via key terms to uncover stories about innovation over the last century. The keywords are listed under 5 categories: "GE", "Moving", "Powering", "Curing" and "Building".
The way the keywords are linked and organized allows the user to explore the historical frequency of specific topics. He or she can also click one of the little multiples to get direct access to the corresponding page of annual report in which the keyword appeared, Infosthetics notes.
