Pie Chart or Pizza: Identifying Chart Types and Their Virality on Twitter

Abstract

We aim to understand how data, rendered visually as charts or infographics, “travels” on social media. To do so we propose a neural network architecture that is trained to distinguish among different types of charts, for instance line graphs or scatter plots, and predict how much they will be shared. This poses significant challenges because of the varying format and quality of the charts that are posted, and the limitations in existing training data. To start with, our proposed system outperforms related work in chart type classification on the ReVision corpus. Furthermore, we use crowdsourcing to build a new corpus, more suitable to our aims, consisting of chart images shared by data journalists on Twitter. We evaluate our system on the second corpus with respect to both chart identification and virality prediction, with promising results.