Towards a Computational Model of Narrative Visualization

The task of narrative visualization has been the subject of increasing interest in recent years. Much like data visualization, narrative visualization offers users an informative and aesthetically pleasing perspective on “story data.” Automatically creating visual representations of narratives poses significant computational challenges due to the complex affective and causal elements, among other things, that must be realized in visualizations. In addition, narratives that are composed by novice writers pose additional challenges due to the disfluencies stemming from ungrammatical text. In this paper, we introduce the NARRATIVE THEATRE, a narrative visualization system under development in our laboratory that generates narrative visualizations from middle school writers’ text. The NARRATIVE THEATRE consists of a rich writing interface, a robust natural language processor, a narrative reasoner, and a storyboard generator. We discuss design issues bearing on narrative visualization, introduce the NARRATIVE THEATRE, and describe narrative corpora that have been collected to study narrative visualization. We conclude with a discussion of a narrative visualization research agenda.