Integrated Spatio-temporal Storyline Visualization with Low Crossover

Abstract

A story is a chain of events. Each event has multiple dimensions, including time, location, characters, actions, and context. Storyline visualizations attempt to visually present the many dimensions of a story’s events and their relationships. Integrating the temporal and spatial dimension in a single visualization view is often desirable but highly challenging. One of the main reasons is that spatial data is inherently 2D while temporal data is inherently 1D. We propose a storyline visualization technique that integrate both time and location information in a single view. We have developed a timeline-based visualization method that maintains regular ordering of temporal and spatial dimensions. We also developed a heuristic method to reduce excessive line crossovers for large data sets. Through case studies, we show that this visualization method provide a good balance in integrating temporal and spatial dimensions.