In Search of Patient Zero: Visual Analytics of Pathogen Transmission Pathways in Hospitals

Pathogen outbreaks (i.e., outbreaks of bacteria and viruses) in hospitals can cause high mortality rates and increase costs for hospitals significantly. An outbreak is generally noticed when the number of infected patients rises above an endemic level or the usual prevalence of a pathogen in a defined population. Reconstructing transmission pathways back to the source of an outbreak -- the patient zero or index patient -- requires the analysis of microbiological data and patient contacts. This is often manually completed by infection control experts. We present a novel visual analytics approach to support the analysis of transmission pathways, patient contacts, the progression of the outbreak, and patient timelines during hospitalization. Infection control experts applied our solution to a real outbreak of Klebsiella pneumoniae in a large German hospital. Using our system, our experts were able to scale the analysis of transmission pathways to longer time intervals (i.e., several years of data instead of days) and across a larger number of wards. Also, the system is able to reduce the analysis time from days to hours. In our final study, feedback from twenty-five experts from seven German hospitals provides evidence that our solution brings significant benefits for analyzing outbreaks

Storytelling and Visualization: An Extended Survey

Throughout history, storytelling has been an effective way of conveying information and knowledge. In the field of visualization, storytelling is rapidly gaining momentum and evolving cutting-edge techniques that enhance understanding. Many communities have commented on the importance of storytelling in data visualization. Storytellers tend to be integrating complex visualizations into their narratives in growing numbers. In this paper, we present a survey of storytelling literature in visualization and present an overview of the common and important elements in storytelling visualization. We also describe the challenges in this field as well as a novel classification of the literature on storytelling in visualization. Our classification scheme highlights the open and unsolved problems in this field as well as the more mature storytelling sub-fields. The benefits offer a concise overview and a starting point into this rapidly evolving research trend and provide a deeper understanding of this topic

Geo-Storylines: Integrating Maps into Storyline Visualizations

International audienceStoryline visualizations are a powerful way to compactly visualize how the relationships between people evolve over time. Real-world relationships often also involve space, for example the cities that two political rivals visited together or alone over the years. By default, Storyline visualizations only show implicitly geospatial co-occurrence between people (drawn as lines), by bringing their lines together. Even the few designs that do explicitly show geographic locations only do so in abstract ways (e.g., annotations) and do not communicate geospatial information, such as the direction or extent of their political campains. We introduce Geo-Storylines, a collection of visualisation designs that integrate geospatial context into Storyline visualizations, using different strategies for compositing time and space. Our contribution is twofold. First, we present the results of a sketching workshop with 11 participants, that we used to derive a design space for integrating maps into Storylines. Second, by analyzing the strengths and weaknesses of the potential designs of the design space in terms of legibility and ability to scale to multiple relationships, we extract the three most promising: Time Glyphs, Coordinated Views, and Map Glyphs. We compare these three techniques first in a controlled study with 18 participants, under five different geospatial tasks and two maps of different complexity. We additionally collected informal feedback about their usefulness from domain experts in data journalism. Our results indicate that, as expected, detailed performance depends on the task. Nevertheless, Coordinated Views remain a highly effective and preferred technique across the board

“Here is the place, my lord”: The Scenic Design Process for King Lear

Undertaking the role of Scenic Designer of West Virginia University School of Theatre & Dance’s 2021 filmed production of King Lear by William Shakespeare was a formidable challenge. A detailed description of the entire scenic design process includes script analysis, research, design meetings, scenic art techniques, and the filming process. It illustrates the journey of what began as a series of renderings and models, transforming into the finalized version of the scenic design

The effort to translate : Fan Film Culture and the Works of J.R.R. Tolkien

In his 1940 preface “On Translating Beowulf,” J.R.R. Tolkien contends that “The effort to translate, or to improve a translation, is valuable, not so much for the version it produces, as for the understanding of the original which it awakes” (53). Though made with a specific literary tradition in mind, Tolkien’s assertion about the value of translation bears re-visitation in light of circumstances where the terminology has shifted. Specifically, Tolkien’s own work has since become the myth undergoing translation, and in popular parlance, translation itself has changed from simply describing the transference of a text between languages to now include the transmutation of narrative(s) between media. The move from text to film illustrates one significant ramification of this re-definition: how to distinguish and enact canonicity with regards to adaptations of the original myth, Tolkien’s Middle-earth. In several of his letters, Tolkien himself forcefully questions the purpose and methodologies of screenwriters and filmmakers looking to adapt his work. And although criticism of text-to-film translation has focused mainly on Peter Jackson’s 2001-2003 Lord of the Rings and 2012-2014 Hobbit film trilogies, an additional area of interest concerns fan film culture, which further complicates questions of translation “validity.” In this paper I expand on existing definitions of “fan films” in order to demonstrate how fan film culture is related to but also distinct from other fannish productions, such as fanvids and playlists, in terms of both purpose and function. I then offer some examples of Tolkien-derived work from across fan film culture, delineating differences of technique, effect, and implication based on type and location, i.e. the differences between fan film culture for the Third Age (The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings) versus the First and Second Ages (Ainulindalë, Quenta Silmarillion, Akallabêth). I also explore the difference between target and viewing audiences and examine reactions from these different audiences in terms of technical and “canonical” reactions, before moving on to examine how fan film culture makes use of pre-existing media, including “real” films. I then argue that although fan films and fan film culture sometimes make use of other Tolkien-derived films, most usually Jackson’s, they should be considered separate and distinct creations because they are paying homage to Tolkien’s world, rather than re-visiting Jackson’s particular vision of it. Finally, I return to earlier questions in order to reflect on claims about translating Tolkien’s Legendarium “correctly,” concluding that there is a difference between “adaptions” and “translations” when considering a narrative’s move from text to film, and specifically, to noncommercial forms such as fan films

Analyzing the Public Discourse on Works of Fiction: Detection and Visualization of Emotion in Online Coverage about HBO's Game of Thrones

This paper presents a Web intelligence portal that captures and aggregates news and social media coverage about "Game of Thrones", an American drama television series created for the HBO television network based on George R.R. Martin's series of fantasy novels. The system collects content from the Web sites of Anglo-American news media as well as from four social media platforms: Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and YouTube. An interactive dashboard with trend charts and synchronized visual analytics components not only shows how often Game of Thrones events and characters are being mentioned by journalists and viewers, but also provides a real-time account of concepts that are being associated with the unfolding storyline and each new episode. Positive or negative sentiment is computed automatically, which sheds light on the perception of actors and new plot elements

DATA-DRIVEN STORYTELLING FOR CASUAL USERS

Today’s overwhelming volume of data has made effective analysis virtually inaccessible for the general public. The emerging practice of data-driven storytelling is addressing this by framing data using familiar mechanisms such as slideshows, videos, and comics to make even highly complex phenomena understandable. However, current data stories still do not utilize the full potential of the storytelling domain. One reason for this is that current data-driven storytelling practice does not leverage the full repertoire of media that can be used for storytelling, such as speech, e-learning, and video games. In this dissertation, we propose a taxonomy focused specifically on media types for the purpose of widening the purview of data-driven storytelling by putting more tools in the hands of designers. We expand the idea of data-driven storytelling into the group of casual users, who are the consumers of information and non-professionals with limited time, skills, and motivation , to bridge the data gap between the advanced data analytics tools and everyday internet users. To prove the effectiveness and the wide acceptance of our taxonomy and data-driven storytelling among the casual users, we have collected examples for data-driven storytelling by finding, reviewing, and classifying ninety-one examples. Using our taxonomy as a generative tool, we also explored two novel storytelling mechanisms, including live-streaming analytics videos—DataTV—and sequential art (comics) that dynamically incorporates visual representations—Data Comics. Meanwhile, we widened the genres we explored to fill the gaps in the literature. We also evaluated Data Comics and DataTV with user studies and expert reviews. The results show that Data Comics facilitates data-driven storytelling in terms of inviting reading, aiding memory, and viewing as a story. The results also show that an integrated system as DataTV encourages authors to create and present data stories

Interactive Holographic Cinema

In mainstream media and entertainment, holography is often misrepresented as single perspective non-stereoscopic imagery suggesting three-dimensionality. Traditional holographic artists, however, utilize a laser setup to record and reconstruct wavefronts to describe a scene in multi-perspective natural parallax vision ("auto-stereoscopic"). Although these approaches are mutually exclusive in practice, they share a similar goal of staging three-dimensional (3D) imagery for a window-like viewing experience. This thesis presents a non-waveform digital computer approach for recording, reconstructing, and experiencing holographic visualizations in a cinematic context. By recording 3D information from a scene using the structured light method, a custom computer program performs stereoscopic reconstruction in real-time during presentation. Artists and computer users could then use a hardware device, such as the Microsoft Kinect, to explore the holographic cinematic form interactively