Visualizing Variation of Relationships Among Characters Accompanying with Story Unfoldment

Abstract

This paper proposes a method for interactively visualizing the variation of relationships among characters in astory to understand narrative structure. Since a story is a narrative that describes the processes of the characters acting,thinking, and interacting with each other, understanding the changing relationships between characters is one of thekey analytical perspectives on story structure. The proposed method visualizes both the timeline for readers (i.e., thenarrative discourse) and the timeline for characters in the story (i.e., the actual sequence of events) to support creatorsin understanding the story content and the way of storytelling. Though the correlation diagram shown in a networkis a popular and well-known method for visualizing characters’ relationships, it is static and challenging for readersto understand the variation of the relationships. The proposed method enables users to interactively find the variationof relationships by controlling the slide bars. The users can see the network variation among characters accompaniedby story unfoldment based on two types of timelines: the narrative discourse and the actual sequence of events. Theexperiment showed that the proposed method helped users understand the relationships among characters and theirvariations. Our future work will be improving the visualization for timelines in which two events are progressingsimultaneously.