StoryFlow: Tracking the Evolution of Stories

IEEE INFOVIS 2013

Shixia Liu, Senior Member, IEEE,

Microsoft Research Asia

Yingcai Wu,Member, IEEE,

Microsoft Research Asia

Yang Liu, Microsoft Research

Asia

Enxun Wei, Shanghai Jiao Tong

University

Mengchen Liu,Tsinghua University

•Understanding how entity relationships evolve from the beginning to the end in a story is very important.

• Existing visualization techniques either produce an aesthetically pleasing and legible storyline picture with much time.

• An interactive visualization with too many wiggly lines and too much visual inconsistency.

•May not fully support real-world storytelling and analysis tasks.

MotivationSystem OverviewEvaluationCase StudiesUser FeedbackFuture WorkConclusion

• Fails to meet the requirements of real-time interactions. The method proposed by Tanahashi et al. may take hours to generate a storyline with hundreds of entities and hundreds of time frames.

• In many real-world applications, settings/locations are naturally organized in a hierarchy.

• The existing visualizations are not designed to accommodate more than hundreds of entity lines. They cannot provide legible results when the number of entities is in the thousands or even hundreds.

MotivationSystem OverviewEvaluationCase StudiesUser FeedbackFuture WorkConclusion

• Hybrid optimization strategy:• The discrete method creates an initial layout

through ordering and aligning line entities. • The continuous method optimizes the layout

based on quadratic convex optimization.

• The efficient algorithm enables a rich set of real-time user interactions, including adding, removing, dragging, straightening, and bundling line entities.

MotivationSystem OverviewEvaluationCase StudiesUser FeedbackFuture WorkConclusion

MotivationSystem OverviewEvaluationCase StudiesUser FeedbackFuture WorkConclusion

•One drawback of genetic algorithms is their expensive computational cost.

•Genetic algorithm has drawbacks such as premature convergence and local optima.

MotivationSystem OverviewEvaluationCase StudiesUser FeedbackFuture WorkConclusion

• Line crossings:• StoryFlow: 25• TM: 80• Original: 53

MotivationSystem OverviewEvaluationCase StudiesUser FeedbackFuture WorkConclusion

Line wiggles:StoryFlow: 110TM: 110Original: 107

MotivationSystem OverviewEvaluationCase StudiesUser FeedbackFuture WorkConclusion

• Twitter dataset• 2012 US presidential election• 89,174,308 tweets• Query word: ”Obama”, ”Romney” and “election”

MotivationSystem OverviewEvaluationCase StudiesUser FeedbackFuture WorkConclusion

• Film professor:• It is a great way to show the interactions between

characters over time, which can definitely help filmmaking.

• Film directors:• StoryFlow enables a fast review of the shooting timetable

and allows the directors to make a better decision on the most advantageous shot order.

• Script adapters:• Use Storyflow to review a script quickly to decide whether

to add or remove certain characters or scenes, also be used as an effective tool to communicate their ideas to the film directors and producers.

• Actors:• Use StoryFlow to better trace their related scenes and see

immediately where and who they will interact with, so that they can better prepare for their performance.

MotivationSystem OverviewEvaluationCase StudiesUser FeedbackFuture WorkConclusion

• Sociology PhD student• Level-of-detail feature of StoryFlow, which enables to

immediately see the overall patterns as well as to directly interact with the visualization to see more detail.

• Interesting to see the dynamic relationships of the liberal and conservative opinion leaders over time.

• A professor in media and communication studies• StoryFlow would be particularly useful for data-driven

journalism because it not only provides a clear visual summary of events but also shows informative context for investigative analysis.

• Adding sentiment information to the StoryFlow visualization to provide richer context for further analysis.

MotivationSystem OverviewEvaluationCase StudiesUser FeedbackFuture WorkConclusion

• Investigate which interactions are useful for what kind of analysis tasks.

• An entity only belongs to one session at one time.

• The timeline in StoryFlow is linear, which does not scale well with thousands of time frames.

• For a simple flashback, can still leverage the StoryFlow visualization, while for a narration interspersed with flashbacks, it is quite challenging to illustrate the story with one storyline layout.

MotivationSystem OverviewEvaluationCase StudiesUser FeedbackFuture WorkConclusion

• Presented an efficient optimization approach to generate a storyline layout with thousands of entities and hundreds of time frames.

• Discrete optimization to minimize the number of line crossings and wiggles, and continuous optimization for minimizing the wiggle distance and white space, can quickly achieve a better local optimum.

MotivationSystem OverviewEvaluationCase StudiesUser FeedbackFuture WorkConclusion