Storygraph: Telling Stories from Spatio-temporal Data

A major task of spatio-temporal data analysis is to discover relationships and patterns among spatially and temporally scattered events. A most common analytic method is to plot them on a 3D chart with latitude, longitude and time being the three dimensions. The first drawback of this technique is that it fails to scale well when there are thousands of concentrated events since they suffer from cluttering, occlusion and other limitations of 3D plots. Second, it is hard to track the time component if the events are clustered in a region. To overcome these, we present a novel 2D visualization technique called Storygraph that provides an integrated view of location and time. Based on Storygraph, we also present storylines which show the movement of the characters over time. Finally, we present two case studies to demonstrate the effectiveness of the Storygraph.