SCRIPT: Systematically creating comic reports for investigation provenance from tools

Visual investigation tools are important for criminal investigations to find evidence in increasing amounts of digital case data. Once digital investigations are completed, important findings are written in hand-crafted textual reports. These reports typically lack structure and do not capture the full trace of evidence during the investigation as they rely on the investigator’s memory. Furthermore, textual descriptions do not accurately represent the steps taken (process provenance), resulting in verbose and imprecise reports which add to the problem of communicating the trace of evidence. Previous work captured application snapshots in process provenance logs and recommended narratives, especially data comics, for visualization. Building on this, we present in this paper the method script and a prototype implementation which, after an initial one-time configuration step, automatically transform process provenance logs of visual investigation tools into data comic reports to improve communicating the trace of evidence. We apply our method to multiple investigation tools utilized by police departments around the world. Based on these results, we interviewed jurists and investigators and performed an online survey to demonstrate script’s effectiveness.