Storychart: A Character Interaction Chart for Visualizing the Activities Flow

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.