The Story(line) So Far: A Survey on Storyline Visualization

Storyline visualizations model narratives as temporal networks, using x-monotone lines to represent entities and their interactions over time. This technique offers an intuitive way to reveal structural patterns over time, such as character co-occurrence and narrative flow. Storylines represent a visualization approach with growing interest from the visualization community and applications in diverse contexts. Researchers have developed various layout algorithms and formalized a set of optimization objectives with the goal of automating their generation and balancing their readability, graph aesthetics, and efficiency. These methods vary in their algorithmic formulations and implementations as well as the visual elements they support, such as labels, grouping, or continuity preservation across time. This state-of-the-art report maps the current landscape of storyline visualization approaches, with a specific focus on the visual structures, optimization objectives, and the characteristic of the layout algorithms that generate these.