Timeline Storyteller


The Design & Deployment of an Interactive Authoring Tool
For Expressive Timeline Narratives

Matthew Brehmer · Microsoft Research · @mattbrehmer

In collaboration with Bongshin Lee, Nathalie Henry Riche, David Tittsworth,
Kate Lytvynets, Darren Edge, and Christopher White.

The 2019 Computation + Journalism Symposium · slides: aka.ms/cj19

The Daily Routines of Famous Creative People

Story inspired by infographics by Podio and info we trust.
Data source: Daily Rituals: How Artists Work by Mason Currey (2013)

Timeline Storyteller


An open-source interactive authoring and presentation tool from Microsoft Research.

Runs in the browser or in Microsoft's Power BI.

timelinestoryteller.com | github.com/Microsoft/timelinestoryteller

A Timeline Design Space


Timelines Revisited: A Design Space and Considerations for Expressive Storytelling.
Brehmer, Lee, Bach, Henry Riche, and Munzner. In IEEE TVCG (2017).


Representation
Linear Radial Spiral Calendar Curve
Scale
Chronological Relative Logarithmic Sequential Collapsed
Layout
Unified Faceted Segmented

Expressive Storytelling with Timelines


Timelines Revisited: A Design Space and Considerations for Expressive Storytelling.
Brehmer, Lee, Bach, Henry Riche, and Munzner. In IEEE TVCG (2017).

timelinesrevisited.github.io



Provide alternative representations for time.

Provide alternative time scales.

Anticipate chronological or non-chronological narratives.

Incrementally reveal visual elements, selectively highlighting and annotating to direct attention.

The Authoring Interface of Timeline Storyteller


Web version imports CSV, JSON, GSheet. Power BI version imports various data formats.
Web version exports PNG, SVG, GIF, JSON spec. Power BI version exports PBIX, iFrame.

Evaluating Timeline Storyteller


A controlled laboratory study to assess expressivity seemed to be inappropriate.

How do people use it with their own data?

How does the content they produce reflect our timeline design space?

Promoting Timeline Storyteller to Practitioners


Demos / talks at the Tapestry Conference, OpenVisConf, and the Dublin Data Summit in 2017.

Demo by Microsoft's Data Journalism Team at the 2017 Future of Storytelling Summit.

Posts on the official Power BI Blog, tutorial + interview for the Power BI YouTube channel.

Demo by a customer during the opening keynote of the 2017 Data Insights Summit:

Timeline Storyteller: Collecting Usage Data


Exported content from the web version in mid 2017.

Entries from a Storytelling Contest with the Power BI user community in late 2017,
coordinated by the Microsoft Data Journalism Team.

Download metrics of the Power BI desktop version:
Over 36,000 downloads of the Power BI version as of January 2019.

Timeline Storyteller: Content Analysis


223 unique items of exported content from the web version (subject to author consent).

The corpus spanned the timeline design space - with a couple of exceptions.

The Linear representation and Chronological time scale were most common.


Linear Radial Spiral Calendar Curve
Chronological Relative Logarithmic Sequential Collapsed
Unified Faceted Segmented

Timeline Storyteller: Content Analysis (cont.)


Example entries from the Power BI user community storytelling contest: Tropical Cyclones by Manga Solutions. | TV Network Ratings by Pragmatic Works.

Timeline Storyteller: Conclusions & Opportunities


No prior interactive tools for presenting expressive timeline narratives.

The first to incorporate multi-scene stories with multiple visual representation choices.

Incrementally reveal + transform; selectively highlight + annotate; applicable to other data types.



Recommend design choices and annotations based on properties of the dataset.

Timeline Storyteller


Matthew Brehmer · Microsoft Research · @mattbrehmer

In collaboration with Bongshin Lee, Nathalie Henry Riche, David Tittsworth,
Kate Lytvynets, Darren Edge, and Christopher White.

timelinestoryteller.com | github.com/Microsoft/timelinestoryteller

powerbi.microsoft.com/datajournalism (Data Journalism @ Microsoft) | aka.ms/cj19 (slides)