Leveraging Foundation Models for Crafting Narrative Visualization: A Survey

TL;DR

This survey reviews how foundation models are increasingly used across various stages of narrative visualization, highlighting techniques, tasks, challenges, and opportunities for future research.

Contribution

It introduces a reference model categorizing foundation model applications into four phases and identifies eight key tasks in narrative visualization.

Findings

Foundation models are applied in analysis, narration, visualization, and interaction stages.

Eight specific tasks are facilitated by foundation models, such as insight extraction and authoring.

The survey discusses challenges and opportunities in leveraging foundation models for narrative visualization.

Abstract

Narrative visualization transforms data into engaging stories, making complex information accessible to a broad audience. Foundation models, with their advanced capabilities such as natural language processing, content generation, and multimodal integration, hold substantial potential for enriching narrative visualization. Recently, a collection of techniques have been introduced for crafting narrative visualizations based on foundation models from different aspects. We build our survey upon 66 papers to study how foundation models can progressively engage in this process and then propose a reference model categorizing the reviewed literature into four essential phases: Analysis, Narration, Visualization, and Interaction. Furthermore, we identify eight specific tasks (e.g. Insight Extraction and Authoring) where foundation models are applied across these stages to facilitate the creation of visual narratives. Detailed descriptions, related literature, and reflections are presented for each task. To make it a more impactful and informative experience for diverse readers, we discuss key research problems and provide the strengths and weaknesses in each task to guide people in identifying and seizing opportunities while navigating challenges in this field.