A simple interactive figure gives its user an experience of playing with data, but in a very limited sandbox. Many top-tier news agencies (e. g. The New York Times) have used and helped develop technology (e.g. the javascript library known as d3) that allows for the creation of interactive figures without a need for dedicated developers. Three key features of the emerging paradigm for ineractive communication of quantitative information are Brushing, Linking, and Staging.
Brushing is the idea of being able to select, with a box or lasso like tool, a subset of the points in a one- or two- dimensional space.
Linking is when data points are connected. In the context of brushing, this allows a user to explore high dimensional spaces by selecting collections of points in one dimension and determining where they lie in another dimension.
Staging is a storytelling tool, allowing the author to reveal or highlight parts of a figure in sequence. The highlighting can take the form of Brushing and Linking as above.
The example below shows a five-stage figure, where each panel is interactive, and offers a different view of the same data (see caption). This YouTube video explains more about the technology stack that created the figure.