J. Kusnick, N. S. Andersen, S. Beck, S. Koch, J. Liem, E. Mayr, S. Jänicke, F. Windhager
This github repo hosts a web-based interactive browser of our survey on Visualization-based Storytelling for Digital Humanities at https://ml4vis.github.io.
We are continuing to update this interactive survey browser.
Abstract
Storytelling is an engaging and effective way to design and communicate information as causally connected sequence of events. As shareable and memorable carriers of information, stories have been told throughout history and related techniques of storytelling have been constantly modernized and updated for changing media environments. As such, storytelling is omnipresent in modern-day society to communicate information in a multimodal fashion, including accounts on diverse fields of human culture. Reflecting on this transdisciplinary area of practice, this paper investigates visualization-based storytelling (VBS) techniques in digital humanities (DH) and cultural heritage (CH) domains. It analyzes the prior art in this field with regard to VBS tools and exemplary story designs to document best practices and map out future challenges. In doing so, we contribute to the fields of VBS, DH and CH in several ways: (i) We combine and enhance storytelling design spaces from related fields into a new comprehensive design space tailored to VBS in DH and CH fields. (ii) We describe and discuss best-practice solutions from related work and categorize them according to our design space criteria, making it possible to identify gaps and discuss open challenges. (iii) Lastly, we highlight the potential of technological and conceptual extensions for VBS in this field, such as augmented reality solutions, gamification and storytelling with micro-content. Ultimately, the outcome of this work is intended to consolidate an emergent area of visual and narrative practice and to provide a source collection for visualization and DH researchers to inform and strengthen collaborative research on advanced VBS solutions.