Three months ago we announced The Closeread Prize, a fun and friendly competition to see who could create the finest scrollytelling story. The only requirement was that the story use Closeread, an extension for Quarto that allows you to author web stories that unfold as the user scrolls through. It’s a powerful scrollytelling technique that takes care and craft to use effectively.

The range of entries that we received was stunning. The topics spanned the gamut from math to sports to folklore and the tools included R, Python, Shiny, and Javascript. Some illuminated a complex topic, others related a moving story. Some were just plain quirky.

We received 40 submissions, and we couldn’t be more pleased by your response! It was quite a challenge to pick a single grand prize winner and narrow the submissions down to a select few highlighted below. You can see all submissions on the Posit Forum here. 

Judging

To make the difficult decision of awarding prizes, we looked for merit in four categories: narrative, scrollytelling-appropriateness, visual polish, and technical accomplishment.

Besides the Closeread maintainers, Andrew Bray, and James Goldie, our judges included Curtis Kephart, a data scientist at Posit, Joshua Byrd, a data journalist and developer with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, and Suzannah Lyons, a science journalist with 360info.org. We really appreciate you taking the time to help us review all these submissions. 

Without further ado, here are the first Closeread Prize winners! 

Grand Prize

EURO 2024 Final Scrollytelling Analysis – by Óscar Bartolomé Pato

View Article | Repo | Submission

James says: “This story customises ggplot2 and ggiraph absolutely flawlessly. It shows just how far Quarto and R’s tools can be pushed with careful consideration of colour and plot elements.”

Special Prizes

Best use of Scrolly Storytelling

Council Housing & Neighborhood Income Inequality in Vienna – by Matthias Schnetzer

View Article | Repo | Submission

Andrew says: “This entry perfectly demonstrates one of my favorite use-cases for Closeread: authoring an engaging story to highlight the key ideas of a technical manuscript. The evolving map of housing in Vienna over time is beautiful and effective. The graphics and tables are all very polished and the layout is as professional as any you find on the web.”

Best Technical Accomplishment

Which Way Do You Ski? – by Trang Le, Joshua Himmelstein, and Daniel Himmelstein

View Article | Repo | Submission

James says: “This story carefully designs successive plots to seamlessly summarise snowfields. Thoughtful visuals and language make this story the complete package!”

Andrew says: “This is an excellent story on all counts but two things stood out to me. 1) the “ski-rose” is an example of a complex visualization that is so well-served by scrollytelling. 2) this scrolly at openskistats.org sits alongside a technical manuscript and beautiful interactive data table, showing how different formats can serve complementary roles in communicating insights about data.”

Best Visual Polish

World Population Flags, by Ansgar Wolsing.

View Article | Repo | Submission
James says: “This story cleverly embeds Observable notebooks to fade out different flags of the world as it zooms around. The text has a strong visual hierarchy and structure, making it extremely readable.”

Best Link Between Scroll and Dynamic Data Visualization

Pictures of Pensions 🖼️, by Declan Naughton.

View Article | Repo | Submission
Curtis says: “This piece is impressive, demonstrating how effectively scrollytelling can be used in data-driven articles.  It synchronizes OJS data visualizations with scroll progress, so as the reader moves down the page and the narrative unfolds, the visualizations change, smoothly transitioning in support of the narrative. I hope those exploring Closeread recognize the wide potential being showcased here!”

Best Zoom

Beyond the Modifiable Areal Unit Problem!, by François Sémécurbe.View Article | Repo | Submission
Andrew says, “There are few more natural fits for the scrollytelling zoom than the study of fractals.  This entry breaks down a complex topic in mathematics and geography using carefully crafted examples that are mathematical and diagrammatic. The final zoom into Paris, showing the changing variability of density, is glorious.”

Best Map Pan & Zoom

A Gem of My Childhood, by Anaël Delorme and François Semecurbe.

View Article | Repo | Submission
Curtis says, “Scrollytelling, when done well, turns reading into an immersive experience. As you scroll, visual elements unfold dynamically, drawing you deeper into the story. When poorly executed, scrollytelling elements can feel gimmicky or distracting, a well-crafted piece enhances storytelling, sets the topic or location, or reinforces key points in an engaging way. A Gem of My Childhood is a lovely example of the promise of scrollytelling with Closeread—it opens with a wide map of France, then zooms into Brittany and the Saint-Jacut-de-la-Mer peninsula as the reader scrolls. Talk about setting the scene and pulling the reader into your story!”

Honorable Mentions

A Short History of Working Time in Austria, by Matthias Schnetzer – Article | Repo | Submission.

Baron Trenck’s Unraveled Secrets, by Eva Maleckova – Article | Repo | Submission.

CATANberra: Creating a Geographically Accurate Catan Board of Australia, by Ben Cochrane – Article | Repo | Submission. James says: “This entry explained a complex mathematical concept using a game that people across the world have played.”

English Monarchs and Marriages, by Nicola Rennie – Article | Repo | Submission. James says: “This story of the ages of English monarchs and their consorts smartly uses fonts, colours and story structure to keep readers engaged through graphics spanning literal centuries.”

Evolution of Javelin Throw Distances, by Clément Rieux – Article | Repo | Submission.

Learn Closeread Website, by Gaston Sanchez – Article | Repo | Submission

MobilityMatters, by Florencia D’Andrea and Pilar Fernandez – Article | Repo | Submission.

PNW Bigfoot Sightings, by Frank Aragona and Russell Shean – Article | Repo | Submission.

Stoppage Time Matters: How Substitutions and Using All Minutes Played Affect Player Statistics, by Eliot McKinley – Article | Repo | Submission.

This is Our Solar System, by Meghan Harris – Article | Repo | Submission.

You Should Have a Favourite Data Story, by Charlotte Hadley – Article | Repo | Submission.  James says: “This story made great use of simple, clear language and visuals to explore other data visualisations. I particularly liked the table, which highlights rows by piping conditional formatting code.”

Contribute to Closeread!

Even if you didn’t win a prize, we deeply appreciate your time and effort — both for helping us improve Closeread, and for showing others what it can do. Our own minds are spinning with ideas!

Your own ideas don’t have to wait: you can publish a Closeread story alongside any Quarto website, so we hope to see scrollytelling stories popping up all over the place this year. If you have colleagues or friends who’re sick and tired of slide decks and reports, show them Closeread!

And if you use Closeread — for work, to teach others, or even just to share a story with others — we’d love to hear from you! We’d love to keep building a vibrant community of scrollytellers on our GitHub Discussions as well as on social media, and if you hang around you’ll be among the first to hear when our next features are available for testing.

To Close

Mentioned above, we received 40 amazing submissions. Looking closely at everyone’s work, we’d dare say that many hundreds of hours of effort went into all the Closeread articles submitted. Considering Closeread was released only a few months before the announcement of this event, we couldn’t be more pleased with your response. We are incredibly grateful to everyone who took the time to dive into scrollytelling with Quarto, to create such polished work, and to share that work with fully reproducible repositories.

As maintainers of a Quarto extension like Closeread, we’ve invested a lot of our own time and effort into making this free tool as useful as possible. We first made it for ourselves: Andrew is a data science educator, and James is a data journalist. But we’d love to extend it further and support as large a community of users as possible.

Being an open source software developer is usually a solo activity, and we often struggle to see how end-users actually use our tools. Seeing what you’ve done for the Closeread Prize, we’ve been blown away. Many authors pushed beyond what we thought Closeread could do — we had to dive into your code to understand how it worked!

Seeing your efforts helps motivate us to continue Closeread’s development. Many of you also filed issues or gave us feedback through your submission, which helped us identify areas for further improvements. We’re already hard at work improving support for htmlwidgets and videos, polishing core aspects of the scrolling experience, and making our documentation clearer!

Thank you so much. 

If Closeread were its own scrollytelling story, the page has just loaded and you’ve only started your scroll. Let’s tell one heck of a story together.