Digital Storytelling: Automatic Animation for Time-Varying Data Visualization

This paper presents a digital storytelling approach that ge nerates automatic animations for time-varying data visualization. Our approach simulates the composition and transition of storytelling techniques and synthesizes animations to describe various event features. Specificall y, we analyze information related to a given event and abstract it as an event graph, which represents data feature s as nodes and event relationships as links. This graph embeds a tree-like hierarchical structure which enco des data features at different scales. Next, narrative structures are built by exploring starting nodes and suitab le search strategies in this graph. Different stages of narrative structures are considered in our automatic rende ring parameter decision process to generate animations as digital stories. We integrate this animation generation approach into an interactive exploration process of timevarying data, so that more comprehensive information can be provided in a timely fashion. We demonstrate with a storm surge application that our approach allows semantic v isualization of time-varying data and easy animation generation for users without special knowledge about the un derlying visualization techniques.