SVEN: Informative Visual Representation of Complex Dynamic Structure
This addresses the challenge of conveying complex dynamic structures visually for researchers and practitioners in data visualization, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing storyline techniques.
The paper tackled the problem of visualizing dynamic graphs by proposing SVEN, a storyline-based method that reduces clutter through optimized vertical placement, resulting in decreased line crossings, straightness, and bends.
Graphs change over time, and typically variations on the small multiples or animation pattern is used to convey this dynamism visually. However, both of these classical techniques have significant drawbacks, so a new approach, Storyline Visualization of Events on a Network (SVEN) is proposed. SVEN builds on storyline techniques, conveying nodes as contiguous lines over time. SVEN encodes time in a natural manner, along the horizontal axis, and optimizes the vertical placement of storylines to decrease clutter (line crossings, straightness, and bends) in the drawing. This paper demonstrates SVEN on several different flavors of real-world dynamic data, and outlines the remaining near-term future work.