Storychart: A Character Interaction Chart for Visualizing the Activities Flow

Zainal Abidin - Institute of Technology Bandung, Bandung, Indonesia
Rinaldi Munir - Institute of Technology Bandung, Bandung, Indonesia
Saiful Akbar - Institute of Technology Bandung, Bandung, Indonesia
Rila Mandala - Institute of Technology Bandung, Bandung, Indonesia
Dwi H. Widyantoro - Institute of Technology Bandung, Bandung, Indonesia


Citation Format:



DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.30630/joiv.7.4.01608

Abstract


Event-predicate-based storyline extraction results in a chronologically ordered activity journal. The extraction results contain complex human activities, so the activity journal requires a visualization model to describe actor interactions. This paper proposes a chart to visualize the activities' flow to describe the characters' interactions in an activity journal. This chart is called a storychart. Storycharts have an actor channel that can accept single entities or teams. The actor channel allows changing the type from single to a team or vice versa and moving members to other teams. The activity channel serves as a connector to accommodate interactions between actors. The activity channel provides a visual space for the elements of what, where, and when. Event predicates are the core of what. Therefore, the storychart visualizes the event predicate using glyphs to attract the reader’s attention. The main contribution of this paper is to introduce a team channel that can visualize the identity of team members and an activity channel that can visualize the details of events. We invited participants to discover the reader’s perception of the ease of team recognition and the integrity of the meaning of the narrative visualized by the storychart. Participants involved in the evaluation were filtered by literacy score. Evaluation of storychart reading showed that readers could easily distinguish teams from single actors, and storycharts could convey the story in the activity journal with little reduction in meaning.

Keywords


Information Visualization; Story Visualization; Text Visualization

Full Text:

PDF

References


N. Hamilton, How To Do Biography: A Primer. Cambridge, Massachusetts, London: Harvard University Press, 2008.

M. S. Dalton and L. Charnigo, “Historians and Their Information Sources,†Coll. Res. Libr., vol. 65, no. 5, pp. 400–425, 2004.

H. R. Tibbo and H. R., “Primarily History : Historians and the Search for Primary Source Materials,†in Proceedings of the second ACM/IEEE-CS joint conference on Digital libraries - JCDL ’02, 2002, p. 1.

M. Oke, Write Your Life Story - How to Record and Present Your Memories for Family and Friends to Enjoy, Third Edit. Oxford: HowToContent, 2008.

A. Thudt, D. Baur, and S. Carpendale, “Autobiographical Visualizations : Challenges in Personal Storytelling,†DIS’14 Work. A Pers. Perspect. Vis. Vis. Anal., 2014.

M. Kraak, Mapping Time: Illustrated by Minard’s Map of Napoleon’s Russian Campaign of 1812, Illustrate. Redlands: Esri Press, 2014.

Randall Munroe, “Movie Narrative Charts,†Xkcd, 2009. [Online]. Available: http://xkcd.com/657/. [Accessed: 07-Jun-2017].

W. Shelley, “Autobiography Version 2,†www.wardshelley.com, 2006. [Online]. Available: http://www.wardshelley.com/paintings/pages/fullpics/autobiography-v2 copy.jpg. [Accessed: 26-Oct-2019].

D. Shahaf, C. Guestrin, E. Horvitz, and J. Leskovec, “Information cartography,†Commun. ACM, vol. 58, no. 11, pp. 62–73, 2015.

A. Rosenber, Daniel; Grafton, Cartographies of time. New York, USA: Princeton Architectural Press, 2010.

W. Aigner, S. Miksch, H. Schumann, and C. Tominski, Visualization of Time-Oriented Data : Human-Computer Interaction Series. London: Springer-Verlag, 2011.

Z. Abidin, D. H. Widyantoro, and S. Akbar, “A Survey on Visualization Techniques to Narrate Interpersonal Interactions between Sportsmen,†Proceeding - ICoSTA 2020 2020 Int. Conf. Smart Technol. Appl. Empower. Ind. IoT by Implement. Green Technol. Sustain. Dev., Feb. 2020.

E. Segel and J. Heer, “Narrative visualization: Telling stories with data,†IEEE Trans. Vis. Comput. Graph., vol. 16, no. 6, pp. 1139–1148, 2010.

V. Ogievetsky, “Plotweaver,†Computer Science Department of Stanford University, 2009. [Online]. Available: graphics.stanford.edu/wikis/cs448b-09-fall/FP-OgievetskyVadim.

M. Ogawa and K.-L. K. Ma, “Software evolution storylines,†in SOFTVIS ’10 Proceedings of the 5th international symposium on Software visualization, 2010, pp. 35–42.

Y. Tanahashi and K. L. Ma, “Design considerations for optimizing storyline visualizations,†IEEE Trans. Vis. Comput. Graph., vol. 18, no. 12, pp. 2679–2688, 2012.

S. Liu, Y. Wu, E. Wei, M. Liu, and Y. Liu, “StoryFlow: Tracking the Evolution of Stories,†IEEE Trans. Vis. Comput. Graph., vol. 19, no. 12, pp. 2436–2445, Dec. 2013.

T. C. Van Dijk et al., “Block crossings in storyline visualizations,†in Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics), 2016, vol. 9801 LNCS, pp. 382–398.

Y. Tanahashi, C. H. Hsueh, and K. L. Ma, “An efficient framework for generating storyline visualizations from streaming data,†IEEE Trans. Vis. Comput. Graph., vol. 21, no. 6, pp. 730–742, 2015.

M. Tapaswi, M. Bauml, and R. Stiefelhagen, “StoryGraphs: Visualizing Character Interactions as a Timeline,†in 2014 IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, 2014, pp. 827–834.

S. Min and J. Park, “Narrative As a Complex Network: A Study of Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables,†in Proceedings of HCI Korea, 2016, pp. 100–107.

F. Wu, M. Zhu, X. Zhao, Q. Wang, W. Chen, and R. Maciejewski, “Visualizing the Time-varying Crowd Mobility,†in SIGGRAPH Asia 2015 Visualization in High Performance Computing, 2015, pp. 15:1--15:4.

A. Cain, Designing Printed Transit Information Materials: A Guidebook for Transit Service Providers. Tampa, Florida, 2008.

D. Shahaf, C. Guestrin, and E. Horvitz, “Trains of thought: Generating information maps,†in Proceedings of the 21st international conference on World Wide Web, 2012, pp. 899–908.

D. Shahaf and C. Guestrin, “Connecting the dots between news articles,†in Proceedings of the 16th ACM SIGKDD, 2010, pp. 623–632.

D. Shahaf, C. Guestrin, and E. Horvitz, “Metro maps of science,†in Proceedings of the 18th ACM SIGKDD international conference on Knowledge discovery and data mining - KDD ’12, 2012, p. 1122.

E. Laparra, I. Aldabe, and G. Rigau, “From TimeLines to StoryLines : A preliminary proposal for evaluating narratives,†in Proceedings of the First Workshop on Computing News Storylines, 2015, pp. 50–55.

N. W. Kim, B. Bach, H. Im, S. Schriber, M. Gross, and H. Pfister, “Visualizing Nonlinear Narratives with Story Curves,†IEEE Trans. Vis. Comput. Graph., vol. 24, no. 1, pp. 595–604, 2018.

T. Tang, S. Rubab, J. Lai, W. Cui, L. Yu, and Y. Wu, “iStoryline: Effective Convergence to Hand-drawn Storylines,†IEEE Trans. Vis. Comput. Graph., vol. 25, no. 1, pp. 769–778, Jan. 2019.

E. Di Giacomo, W. Didimo, G. Liotta, F. Montecchiani, and A. Tappini, “Storyline Visualizations with Ubiquitous Actors,†in Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics), 2020, vol. 12590 LNCS, pp. 324–332.

O. Neurath, International Picture language: The First Rules of Isotype. K. Paul, Trench, Trubner & Company, Limited, 1939.

B. J. Kouwer, Colors and Their Character: A Psychological Study. Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands, 1949.

A.-L. Minard et al., “TimeLine : Cross-Document Event Ordering,†Proc. 9th Int. Work. Semant. Eval., no. SemEval, pp. 778–786, 2015.

R. Ingria et al., “TimeML: Robust Specification of Event and Temporal Expressions in Text,†New Dir. Quest. Answering, vol. 3, pp. 28–34, 2003.

J. Boy, R. A. Rensink, E. Bertini, and J. D. Fekete, “A principled way of assessing visualization literacy,†IEEE Trans. Vis. Comput. Graph., vol. 20, no. 12, pp. 1963–1972, Dec. 2014.

S. Lee, S. H. Kim, and B. C. Kwon, “VLAT: Development of a Visualization Literacy Assessment Test,†IEEE Trans. Vis. Comput. Graph., vol. 23, no. 1, pp. 551–560, 2017.

J. Diamond and W. Evans, “The Correction for Guessing,†Rev. Educ. Res., vol. 43, no. 2, pp. 181–191, Jun. 1973.