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.

The latest advances in mixed reality promote new capabilities that allow head-mounted displays, such as Microsoft HoloLens, to visualize various data and information in a real physical environment. While such new features have great potential for new generations of visualization systems, they require fundamentally different visualization and interaction techniques that have not been well explored. This paper presents an immersive visualization approach for investigating abnormal events in heterogeneous, multi-source, and time-series sensor data collections in real-time on the site of the event. Our approach explores the essential components for an analyst to visualize complex data and explore hidden connections in mixed reality; it also combines automatic event detection algorithms to identify suspicious activities. We demonstrate our prototype system by using the developer version of Microsoft HoloLens and presenting case studies that require an analyst to investigate related data on site. We also discuss the limitations of the current infrastructure and potential applications for security visualization.

Figure 1: An example from our latent semantic model for interactive recommendation and abstraction of user preferences. Our approach identifies a 2D visualization domain, where the horizontal axis layouts recommendable movies on a latent dimension between two combined movie features that are selected based on the user's watch history, and the vertical axis uses recommendation degrees to move highly recommendable movies to the top. This example demonstrates the preference of a user on drama/documentary/biography movies (green zone toward the right) over comedy/music genres (orange zone toward the left). The movies selected to recommend are enlarged as blue circles, recommendable movies are shown as purple nodes, watched and liked movies as green nodes, and disliked movies as orange nodes. Two example movie posters, one liked movie "Casino" and one disliked movie "Airheads", are also provided to demonstrate the latent dimension. For illustration purpose, we also add the arrowed line at the bottom and several movie titles to confirm the movie distributions on the visualization domain. ABSTRACTRecommendation has become one of the most important components of online services for improving sale records, however visualization work for online recommendation is still very limited. This paper presents an interactive recommendation approach with the following two components. First, rating records are the most widely used data for online recommendation, but they are often processed in high-dimensional spaces that can not be easily understood or interacted with. We propose a Latent Semantic Model (LSM) that captures the statistical features of semantic concepts on 2D domains and abstracts user preferences for personal recommendation. Second, we propose an interactive recommendation approach through a storytelling mechanism for promoting the communication between the user and the recommendation system. Our approach emphasizes interactivity, explicit user input, and semantic information convey; thus it can be used by general users without any knowledge of recommendation or visualization algorithms. We validate our model with data statistics and demonstrate our approach with case studies from the MovieLens100K dataset. Our approaches of latent semantic analysis and interactive recommendation can also be extended to other network-based visualization applications, including various online recommendation systems.

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