Storytelling by the StoryCake visualization

On the issue of how to explore the complex relationships of entities in a story, Storyline visualization has proven to be a useful approach. The traditional Storyline visualization technology only applies to a linear continuous story and has the limitation of reflecting the development of the plots in a story. In this paper, we propose a hierarchical plot visualization method called StoryCake to improve this problem. First, according to the story elements, inter-sessions are divided into groups, whereby the layout of the entities will be optimized in individual groups. Then, the hierarchical relationships of entities in polar coordinates can be confirmed. Finally, we use several skills, e.g., interaction, labels and a fan-shaped visualization view, to enable people better understand how story evolves and track the hierarchical relationship more conveniently. Experimental results show that the proposed hierarchical plot visualization method in polar coordinates can reveal discontinuous events and nonlinear stories. The results also show that our algorithm presents the narrative structure and development of the story.