Expressive Storytelling with Timelines

Matthew Brehmer · Microsoft Research · @mattbrehmer
Linear

Seattle Uber Visualization Night · 08-31-2017 · slides: timelinesrevisited.github.io/meetup-slides

timelinestoryteller.com

Common visual representations of time:

Joseph Priestley (1765)

flickr/shenghunglin

LadyofHats (Wikimedia Commons)

flickr/46704958@N07

flickr/studiocurve

M. Twain (1914). "How to make history dates stick". Harper's Monthly Magazine.

Common visual representations of time:

What is a Timeline For?

What happened when?

In what sequence did the events occur?

How long did the events last?

How long between event A and event B?

Did A and B co-occur?

When did A and B occur relative to event C?

The Careers of U.S. Open Golf Champions

Wikimedia Commons; L: Dustin Johnson; R: Jim Furyk

The Careers of U.S. Open Golf Champions

A Timeline Design Space

Common timeline designs at timelinesrevisited.github.io

Storytelling With Timelines

Expressive Storytelling With Timelines

Choice of representations for time

Choice of time scales

Support for chronological or non-chronological narratives

TimelineStoryteller.com

Choice of representations for time

Choice of time scales

Support for chronological or non-chronological narratives

And so we built Timeline Storyteller, an open-source presentation tool that my colleagues and I initially released in January, which ran in the web browser. And as of three weeks ago, we shipped this as a free custom visualization component for Microsoft Power BI, which if you are unfamiliar is a business intelligence tool that's been out now for a couple of years, which you can get for free.

Timeline Storyteller is a scene-based presentation tool, where for in each scene in a story, the author can choose to hide, reveal, emphasize, an annotate part of their timeline, and choose a new representation or time scale to better suit their narrative intent.

Once you record a story, you can publish it to the web and embed it in a website or blog, as I have done in these slides.

When's the Next Solar Eclipse?

Timeline Storyteller for Power BI: A Demo Story

The Timeline Design Space

Different combinations of timeline representation and scale
tell different stories about your data.

Storytelling Considerations

Don't limit the story by using a single design space combination.

Use animated transitions and annotation for incremental reveal,
and to connect consecutive narrative points.

Collaborators:

Bongshin Lee, Nathalie Henry Riche, Tamara Munzner, Benjamin Bach,
Darren Edge, Chris White, David Tittsworth, Kate Lytvynets,
Microsoft Power BI, and the Microsoft Data Journalism Program.

More Information:

timelinesrevisited.github.io: IEEE TVCG paper + survey website
timelinestoryteller.com: open-source tool for web and Power BI
OpenVisConf 2017: "What Story Does Your Timeline Tell?"

Contact:

Matthew Brehmer · mattbrehmer.github.io · @mattbrehmer

Seattle Uber Visualization Night · 08-31-2017 · slides: timelinesrevisited.github.io/meetup-slides