StoryPrint: an Interactive Visualization of Stories Katie Watson Sasha Schriber Carlos Manuel Muniz Zurich, Switzerland Zurich, Switzerland New Jersey, United States [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] Samuel S. Sohn Markus Gross Mubbasir Kapadia New Jersey, United States Zurich, Switzerland New Jersey, United States [email protected] [email protected] Figure 1. StoryPrint is an interactive visualization of script-based stories that plots scenes, character presence, and character emotion around a circular time axis. ABSTRACT interviews of 100 naive users tested usability and intuitiveness In this paper, we propose StoryPrint, an interactive visual- of design while a smaller group study consisting of hour-long ization of creative storytelling that facilitates individual and interviews with expert users tested both usability and useful- comparative structural analyses. This visualization method is ness as a tool for the writing process and industry. Naive intended for script-based media, which has suitable metadata. users found the visualization tool to be effective in its por- The pre-visualization process involves parsing the script into trayal of emotion, characterization, and setting. In addition, different metadata categories and analyzing the sentiment on naive users showed that the difference overlay was a better a character and scene basis. For each scene, the setting, char- visualization for comparative visual analytics than the tradi- acter presence, character prominence, and character emotion tional side-by-side comparison. In the expert study, 4 out of of a film are represented as a StoryPrint. The visualization 5 experts supported the use of StoryPrint as a tool during the is presented as a radial diagram of concentric rings wrapped writing process, and all five found the tool useful for compar- around a circular time axis. A user then has the ability to ing scripts. We conclude that this tool effectively fills the gap toggle a difference overlay to assist in the cross-comparison in the interactive visualization of individual and comparative of two different scene inputs. analysis research and could introduce a useful tool for writing and comparing scripts for users of all types of experience. We evaluated our visualization tool with two different user study groups. A larger group study consisting of 15-minute Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or ACM Classification Keywords classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed H.5.m. Information Interfaces and Presentation (e.g. HCI): for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation Miscellaneous; See http://acm.org/about/class/1998/ for the on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or full list of ACM classifiers. This section is required. republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]. CHI’16, May 07–12, 2016, San Jose, CA, USA Author Keywords © 2016 Copyright held by the owner/author(s). Publication rights licensed to ACM. ISBN 123-4567-24-567/08/06. $15.00 Interactive Visualization, Story Analysis, Digital Storytelling DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.475/123_4 INTRODUCTION experience in each scene (polar, from negative to positive). The format in which information is presented influences the As detailed later in the paper, our application also allows for information’s comprehension, making data visualization a cross-comparisons between different scripts, by either aligning powerful tool. An effective visual can drastically reduce the them side-by-side or displaying a difference overlay between amount of time needed to understand a complex or large data the two scripts. set. In this paper, we demonstrate how the form of our visual- To evaluate the effectiveness of our approach, we conducted ization tool can present an improvement for analysis functions two user studies: hour-long interviews with five screenwriters, prevalent in the creation of films. and fifteen-minute surveys with 100 naive participants. Four Films are an important example of creative storytelling that out of the five screenwriters stated they would use StoryPrint afford complex, multi-faceted data sets through their scripts. as a tool during the writing process, and all five found the Often, the comprehension of this information is made un- tool useful for comparing scripts. While some naive users wieldy by its limited means of raw consumption. Without struggled more than others, a majority were able to answer processing, the reading and viewing of scripts and videos are questions about script structure quickly and, according to their quite time-intensive. On the contrary, condensations of both self-reports, easily. forms, such as film synopses and movie trailers can be too Section 3 contains a design overview of StoryPrint. Section 4 vague – the latter of which can be intentionally misrepresen- contains a technical overview of the system. Section 5 explores tative and sensationalistic. These disadvantages make these comparisons of stories of different script genres, with a focus representations unsuitable for analyses deeper than compar- on film, television, and draft versions of a script. Section 6 ing the general plots of different films. This motivates the describes our evaluation method and results. The contribution development of visualizations for films. of this paper is two-part. The first is an automated method For a more complex comparison of film structures, experts will for the structural visualization of script-based media, using often watch and re-watch films. While this method is useful only text-based, script input. The second, is an interactive for understanding a film’s general plot, it is less effective design that facilitates cross-comparison of script-based media when analyzing a film’s structure. A film’s structure goes far through both a side-by-side layout and an automated difference beyond just a solid grasp of a plot, and how each character is overlay. involved in the plot. Structure may include but is not limited to: relative scene length, character prominence, setting changes, RELATED WORK and emotional shifts over the course of the film. Analyzing Radial data visualizations of storylines is a continuation of these aspects across different films may require either reading Storyline Visualization, Visual Analytics, and Radial Data each script or watching each film in its entirety. Visualizations. In the following section we explore a variety of Finding an effective visualization for film plots would facili- research perspectives that contribute towards the development tate an in-depth structural analysis, and a visual analytic tool of our platform. for both film fans and experts could allow for a broader under- standing of this data and story format. Ideally, users should 2.1 Storyline Visualization be able to readily identify thematic or structural patterns from Recent research efforts have broadened our understanding of the visualization. Such a visual tool could be used during effective mechanisms for extracting and visualizing narratives. the screenwriting process for comparing original and revised For the visualization of preexisting narratives such as film, scripts. Other uses include comparative media analysis, or as various papers have taken inspiration from Randall Munroe’s a tool for helping an audience decide which media they want “Movie Narrative Charts,”[12] wherein he visualizes character to consume by quickly communicating information about dif- interactions by plotting character presence along a time x-axis ferent episodes or films without spoiling the plot. and setting y-axis. In the resulting graph, each line bundle is representative of a character interaction in the film. While While there are existing storyline visualizations, most focus Munroe’s visualizations were hand-drawn, this visualization on a single aspect of a film, such as character interactions was automated by Ogawa and Ma in 2010 [14]. (Section 2.1). Other methods are useful for analysis on a film-by-film basis, but are less effective, visually, for film Tanahashi and Ma [18] took this automation and used evo- comparison. As it stands, there is no method for visualizing the lutionary computation to significantly improve visualization many structural components of a film plot, including character aestheics and legibility. In 2013, Liu et al. [8] developed an presence, setting, and emotional shifts. Thus, in this paper we efficient optimization approach to storyline visualization that propose StoryPrint, a uniform-sized, interactive visualization handles the hierarchical relationships between entities over of film metadata, constructed to make both individual and time. Gronemann et al. [5] delved further in to the storyline comparative analyses easier. visualization problem by modeling the crossing minimiza- tion as a multi-layer crossing minimization problem with tree Figure1 shows three different visualizations, based on an input constraints. of the film 500 Days of Summer. An individual visualization, as shown, facilitates the analysis of the chosen film’s struc- Storyline visualization platforms often use their visualiza- ture by showing the breakdown of scenes, setting distribution, tion techniques to attract new ways of human