Storytelling and Visualization

Unsolved Problems and Conclusions

This survey provides a novel up-to-date overview of storytelling in visualization. The most important recent literature is included and discussed. Since storytelling in visualization is a recently new subject, we expect an increase in research in the coming years. Moreover we believe it will evolve into a popular topic in the field of visualization.

By reviewing Table 1 and Table 2, we can see storytelling visualization focuses on information visualization more than scientific visualization, which conveys that more challenges are left unsolved in this field. However, by refining a storytelling model for scientific visualization, the implementation of storytelling in scientific visualization could increase in the future. We can also see that storytelling in visualization concentrates more on exploration than on presentation. Like Kosara and Mackinlay state: "visualization techniques address the exploration and analysis of data more than presenting data".

In future work, there are many directions and unsolved problems. Storytelling will gain importance in data presentation and data exploration. Here is a summary of some unsolved problems in storytelling for visualization.

• It is clear that objective measures of user-engagement is a relatively unexplored area of research. Can we derive a mature classification of user engagement activities? Is user engagement something we can clearly define?
• Data preparation and enhancement: Virtually no one has addressed the challenge of data preparation and enhancement for storytelling. Moreover, is storytelling data best captured or derived from an existing data set or software system? Can a standard data file format be developed?
• Narrative visualization for scientific and geo-spatial visualization: Why has there been such an imbalance of research narrative visualization for information visualization but virtually none for scientific and geo-spatial visualization.
• Transitions for scientific visualization: The benefits of static transition versus dynamic transitions in visualization still remains relatively immature.
• Memorability for visualization: What are the key elements for making a memorable visualization? This is still an immature research direction.
• Animated transitions for geo-spatial visualization: Animated transitions for geo-spatial visualization remains an open research direction. This is surprising given the popularity and importance of geo-spatial visualization.
• Interpretation for scientific information, and geo-spatial visualization: Currently no papers to our knowledge focus on the topic of effective interpretation of stories, this topic remains largely unexplored.
  

The classification of literature, we present makes it clear that many future research directions remain open in storytelling and visualization.