We use a taxonomy of panel-to-panel transitions in comics, refined the definition of its components to reflect the nature of data-stories in information visualization, and then, use the taxonomy in coding a number of VAST challenges videos from the last four years. We represent the use of transitions in each video graphically with a diagram that shows how the information was added incrementally in order to tell a story that answers a particular question. A number of issues have been taken into account when coding transitions in each video as well as in designing and creating the visual diagram such as, nested transitions, the use of sub-topics, and delayed transitions

Badawood, D.

Wood, J.

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Badawood, D. & Wood, J. (2013). A visual language to characterise transitions in narrative visualization. Paper presented at the IEEE Conference on Information Visualization (InfoVis), 13-18 October 2013, Atlanta, Georgia, USA.City Research OnlineOriginal citation: Badawood, D. & Wood, J. (2013). A visual language to characterise transitions in narrative visualization. Paper presented at the IEEE Conference on Information Visualization (InfoVis), 13-18 October 2013, Atlanta, Georgia, USA.Permanent City Research Online URL: http://openaccess.city.ac.uk/2817/ Copyright & reuseCity  University  London has developed City  Research Online  so that  its  users  may access the research outputs of City University London's staff. Copyright © and Moral Rights for this paper are retained by the individual author(s) and/ or other copyright holders.  All material in City Research Online is checked for eligibility for copyright before being made available in the live archive. URLs from City Research Online may be freely distributed and linked to from other web pages. Versions of researchThe version in City Research Online may differ from the final published version. Users are advised to check the Permanent City Research Online URL above for the status of the paper.EnquiriesIf you have any enquiries about any aspect of City Research Online, or if you wish to make contact  with the author(s) of this paper, please email the team at publications@city.ac.uk.A Visual Language to Characterise Transitions in Narrative VisualizationDonia Badawood∗ Jo Wood†giCentre, City University LondonABSTRACTWe use a taxonomy of panel-to-panel transitions in comics, refinedthe definition of its components to reflect the nature of data-storiesin information visualization, and then, use the taxonomy in codinga number of VAST challenges videos from the last four years. Werepresent the use of transitions in each video graphically with a di-agram that shows how the information was added incrementally inorder to tell a story that answers a particular question. A number ofissues have been taken into account when coding transitions in eachvideo as well as in designing and creating the visual diagram suchas, nested transitions, the use of sub-topics, and delayed transitions.Index Terms:Storytelling, Narrative Visualization, Transitions,Panel-to-Panel Transitions, Comics.1 INTRODUCTIONOxford Dictionary defines a transition as “the process or a periodof changing from one state or condition to another”. This basic def-inition can be applied to several contexts including storytelling andinformation visualization. Transitions control detailed changes andprogression in any story. For example, scene transitions in films,and panel-to-panel transitions in comics [3, 4]. Storytelling throughinformation visualization, whether the story is delivered by a directnarrative or explored interactively by users, consists of a chain ofactions that trigger a transition from one event to another. As aresult, the story unfolds smoothly and gives a sense of continuity.Due to the variety of data that can be visualized and used in sto-rytelling through information visualization, controlling progressionin data-stories can be complex. While there are studies and rules ofgraphical representations suitable for different data types and pat-terns, the choices of transitions an author/designer has to commu-nicate a message, and tell a story are much more complex, some-times requiring the use of several visualization techniques, and/ora combination of conflicting views or facts. The extent to whichdifferent types of transitions have been used to tell stories with datathrough information visualization is little represented in the litera-ture. Hence, further studies to cover this aspect of narrative visual-ization are required. Looking at some characteristics of transitionsacross other more mature domains of visual storytelling, such asfilms and comics, could be highly beneficial to address the issue oftransitions in storytelling visualization. A review of literature alsoreveals that much of the work on transitions in information visu-alization has focused more on technical/graphical techniques used,rather than on the placement of these transitions within a story, andtheir role in narrative construction [1, 2]. The aim of this work isto explore, and characterise the transition types used to tell storiesthrough information visualization. This was done by qualitativelycoding the dataset of VAST challenge videos over the last four yearsbased on the McCloud taxonomy of transition types in comics [3, 4]after refining the model and redefining its components.∗e-mail: Donia.Badawood.1@city.ac.uk†e-mail:jwo@soi.city.ac.uk2 MCCLOUD TAXONOMY OF PANEL-TO-PANEL TRANSI-TIONS IN COMICSFor comics, McCloud proposed taxonomy of transitions from onepanel to another [3, 4], consisting of six types: (1) Moment-to-moment: “a single action portrayed in a series of moments”. (2)Action-to-action: “a single subject (person, object, etc.) in a se-ries of actions”. (3) Subject-to-subject: “a series of changing sub-jects within a single scene”. (4) Scene-to-scene: “transitions acrosssignificant distance of time and/or space”. (5) Aspect-to-aspect:“transitions from one aspect of a place, idea, or mood to another”.(6) Non-sequitur: “a series of seemingly nonsensical, unrelated im-ages and/or words” [3, 4]. This taxonomy allows an analysis of theprocess of telling a story in a visual medium through the use of acombination of pictures and words. It can be argued that commu-nicating data-stories through information visualization consists ofthe same basic elements, pictures (visual representation) and words(annotations/vocals). However, information visualization has onemore important component that impact on story development: itis a highly interactive medium. McCloud’s taxonomy of transitiontypes is nonetheless relatable to storytelling through information vi-sualization, as interactivity still occurs in a sequential manner, withone action at a time leading to the next event.3 REFINEMENT OF MCCLOUD TAXONOMY, AND CODINGPROCESSWe started with the task descriptions of VAST challenges. In eachdescription, we identified the components of the transition types(subjects, moments,etc.) based on our definition of these elements(see below). Thus, we have a consistent understanding of some ini-tial story components among the video submissions for each chal-lenge. We transcribed the videos, recording the time of the begin-ning and the end of each sentence, as well as the beginning and theend of the whole video. We worked through each video transcriptin the same way, identifying the components of the transition types.As we went through each transcript, we segmented the story intosmaller units. Each story unit contains a piece of information. Astory unit is represented by usually a sentence or more, depend-ing on the completion of the meaning that accompanies/follows avisual. The story unit may also contain one or more of the tran-sitions components. In addition to the video transcripts, we tookvisuals into account when coding the videos. This had an effect oncoding, particularly in case of Aspect-to-Aspect transition, whichmeans looking at the data using different views, representations, ortools (similar to “a wandering eye” around a place or something incomics [3]). Next, we identified the transition types between storyunits. Our definitions of the transition types in the context of infor-mation visualization were as follows:Subject-to-Subject Transition: A subject is an entity/actor thatdoes something (an action) in the story. This is similar to the valuesof a variable in statistics. Example here might be an employee, oran IP address. A subject-to-subject transition occurs from a subjector type of subjects in one story unit to another subject or type ofsubjects in the next story unit (if the transition is not delayed).Action-to-Action Transition: Here we differentiated betweentwo types of actions. Type 1 relates to how the participant/analyst(s)interacted with the data/tool. For example, “filter out IP addresses”.Figure 1: The Visual Encoding of the Story Components and Transi-tion Types in Each VAST Challenge video.Figure 2: A Transition Diagram showing nested grouping of aspectsin the first part. (Submission: VAST 2009- MC2- giCentre, City Uni-versity London)Type 2 relates to actions that represent part of the data/scenario.For example, “employee A left his office”. An Action-to-Actiontransition occurs from an action in one story unit to another in thenext story unit (sometimes the Action-to-Action transition delayedby two or more story units. See Figure 5).Scene-to-Scene Transitions: Scenes in general provide somekind of compression or conclusion. Therefore, if a video was di-vided explicitly into a number of sub-topics (usually represent-ing stages of addressing the task) each sub-topic was considereda scene. A Scene-to-Scene transition thus occurs between any twosub-topics (a series of transitions may occur between smaller storyunits inside those scenes). A group of story units that lead to afinding is also considered a scene, as is the finding or conclusion.A Scene-to-Scene transition occurs between a number of steps orstory units that are grouped based on common idea/topic and thefinding or conclusion drawn from this group.Aspect-to-Aspect Transition: An Aspect-to-Aspect transitionoccurs when the applications, views, techniques, or visual repre-sentations are changed from a story unit or section to another inorder to look at data from different angles. For example, betweenmap view and timeline. In some cases, a number of story units aregrouped together into one aspect. For example, in Figure 2, the firstpart of the story was describing three main applications developedto arrive to the answer, each of them enable some actions, explo-ration, and gaining specific insights that contribute to the wholestory and final answer.Moment-to-Moment Transition: A moment is a point of timein the story. For example, “at 10am on 17th May”. A Moment-Figure 3: A Transition Diagram showing the occurrence of an Action-to-Action transition between two actions that represent part of thedata/scenario (Action Type 2). (Submission: VAST 2011- MC2- Uni-versity of Konstanz)Figure 4: A Transition Diagram showing the occurrence of a Scene-to-Scene transition between a group of story units and the find-ing/conclusion drawn from this group. (Submission: VAST 2010-MC1- Georgia Institute of Technology)Figure 5: A Transition Diagram showing a delayed transition andemerging of finding at the end of a long series of actions. (Sub-mission: VAST 2011- MC1- giCentre, City University London)to-Moment transition occurs between two story units, where thedifference in time between two different moments in each story unitis very short.4 VISUAL ENCODING, AND SAMPLE DIAGRAMSThe transitions used to tell a story in each VAST challenge video arefused into a single diagram. The visual encoding of each diagramis shown in Figure 1. Sample diagrams are shown in Figure 2 to 5.5 CONCLUSION, DISCUSSION, AND FUTURE WORKWe used a taxonomy of transitions in comics, refined it, and applyit to a number of the VAST challenge videos. The diagrams cre-ated give a picture of how each story was told and how informationwas added incrementally. Although all the VAST challenge videoshave not been coded so far, some observations can already be seen.For example, in Figure 5, findings emerged after a relatively longseries of actions, while in Figure 3 there were immediate findingsafter fewer actions. Furthermore, our visual encoding of transitionsshows how different components, including visualization, are usedin story telling process. For example, how interaction (Action Type1) impacts on story progression, and how alternating between dif-ferent techniques (Aspect-to-Aspect transition) is used. The nextstep after coding the videos is to look at all generated diagrams andanalyse them by investigating different factors, such as the nature ofthe task/data, award winners, etc. The coded diagrams could also beuseful to design by encouraging the use of the techniques that leadto a specific path or series of transitions that the designer wants theuser to take when constructing a story by interactively exploring avisualization.REFERENCES[1] P. Dragicevic, A. Bezerianos, W. Javed, N. Elmqvist, and J.-D. Fekete.Temporal distortion for animated transitions. In Proceedings of theSIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI’11, pages 2009–2018, New York, NY, USA, 2011. ACM.[2] J. Heer and G. Robertson. Animated transitions in statistical datagraphics. IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graph-ics, 13(6):1240–1247, Nov. 2007.[3] S. McCloud. Understanding Comics. A Kitchen Sink book. Harper-Collins, 1994.[4] S. McCloud. Making Comics. HarperCollins, 2011.

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