StoryPrint: an Interactive Visualization of Stories

In this paper, we propose StoryPrint, an interactive visualization of creative storytelling that facilitates individual and comparative structural analyses. This visualization method is intended for script-based media, which has suitable metadata. The pre-visualization process involves parsing the script into different metadata categories and analyzing the sentiment on a character and scene basis. For each scene, the setting, character presence, character prominence, and character emotion of a film are represented as a StoryPrint. The visualization is presented as a radial diagram of concentric rings wrapped around a circular time axis. A user then has the ability to toggle a difference overlay to assist in the cross-comparison of two different scene inputs. We evaluated our visualization tool with two different user study groups. A larger group study consisting of 15-minute interviews of 100 naive users tested usability and intuitiveness of design while a smaller group study consisting of hour-long interviews with expert users tested both usability and usefulness as a tool for the writing process and industry. Naive users found the visualization tool to be effective in its portrayal of emotion, characterization, and setting. In addition, naive users showed that the difference overlay was a better visualization for comparative visual analytics than the traditional side-by-side comparison. In the expert study, 4 out of 5 experts supported the use of StoryPrint as a tool during the writing process, and all five found the tool useful for comparing scripts. We conclude that this tool effectively fills the gap in the interactive visualization of individual and comparative analysis research and could introduce a useful tool for writing and comparing scripts for users of all types of experience.