Storyline Visualizations with Ubiquitous Actors

TL;DR

This paper introduces a generalized storyline visualization model called SUA that allows actors to belong to multiple groups simultaneously, representing actors as trees instead of single lines, with an algorithmic pipeline for visualization.

Contribution

The paper proposes the SUA model, enabling actors to be part of multiple groups at once, and provides an algorithmic approach for visualizing these complex social interactions.

Findings

Successfully applied to publication data case studies.

Enables more flexible and realistic social interaction visualizations.

Provides an algorithmic pipeline for SUA visualization.

Abstract

Storyline visualizations depict the temporal dynamics of social interactions, as they describe how groups of actors (individuals or organizations) change over time. A common constraint in storyline visualizations is that an actor cannot belong to two different groups at the same time instant. However, this constraint may be too severe in some application scenarios, thus we generalize the model by allowing an actor to simultaneously belong to distinct groups at any point in time. We call this model Storyline with Ubiquitous Actors (SUA). Essential to our model is that an actor is represented as a tree rather than a single line. We describe an algorithmic pipeline to compute storyline visualizations in the SUA model and discuss case studies on publication data.