Storytelling and Visualization
Storytelling has always been an effective way of conveying information and knowledge. In the field of visualization, storytelling is rapidly gaining momentum and evolving cutting-edge techniques that enhance understanding as storytellers are integrating more complex visualizations into their narratives. Read this article to explore the survey of storytelling literature in visualization and present an overview of the common and important elements in storytelling visualization.
Related Work
Ma et al. state that a story that is well paced exhibits deliberate control over the rate at which plot points occur. They present a selection of scientific storytelling visualizations from NASA related work and describes various examples.
The Scientific Visualization Studio (SVS) at NASA uses storytelling visualization to investigate observational data collected by instruments and sensors and make it more suitable for consumption by the public.
The science museum presents visualization to the public with complex and abstract geographic phenomena at extreme size scales for explanatory animations. The science museums provide further interpretation through labels, videos, and live demonstrations. See Figure 3.
Figure
3. Ma et al. show the interactive software used at the Exploratorium in
San Francisco. The purpose of this software is to educate users on the
process of how tides, currents and rivers combine in the estuary of San
Francisco bay. A touch-screen is used to place floats into the virtual
water so that the user can see the effects of the current on the float.
Users can watch the effects of predicted tide and river flow cycles on
the floats trajectory. Other contextual information is provided as an
animation alongside the visualization.
Storytelling enables the user to interact with geographic data such as the Earth's climate or the collapse of a star by using a story model, such as story nodes or story transitions. Ma et al. is based on previous scientific visualization work at NASA, based in the scientific research center and scientific museum and describe how visualization can be used to tell a good story, and tell it well. This is a topic that the scientific visualization research community paid little attention to at that time.
Tong et al. published a
storytelling visualization survey paper as a short paper in abridged
form. It contains no image or paper summaries. This is a full-length,
comprehensive, extended version of that survey. It is approximately
double the length.