Timeline Storyteller: The Design & Deployment of an Interactive Authoring Tool for Expressive Timeline Narratives

Computation+Journalism Symposium |

Download BibTex
The interface of Timeline Storyteller, where the timeline canvas spans the entire browser window. Interface components include: (A) toggles for alternative timeline representations, scales, and layouts; (B) a movable event legend; (C) widgets for loading data, annotating the canvas with captions and images, filtering and highlighting events, and exporting content; (D) scene recording and playback controls along with a scene list; and (E) tutorial and help widgets. This example displays a scene from a story about the performance record of professional golfers at the US Open golf tournament throughout their careers (see the interactive story at https://aka.ms/timelinestoryteller-golf-story). Golfer images: Wikimedia (CC).

The interface of Timeline Storyteller, where the timeline canvas spans the entire browser window. Interface components include: (A) toggles for alternative timeline representations, scales, and layouts; (B) a movable event legend; (C) widgets for loading data, annotating the canvas with captions and images, filtering and highlighting events, and exporting content; (D) scene recording and playback controls along with a scene list; and (E) tutorial and help widgets. This example displays a scene from a story about the performance record of professional golfers at the US Open golf tournament throughout their careers. Golfer images: Wikimedia (CC).

Timeline Storyteller (opens in new tab) is an open-sourced interactive application for authoring expressive visualization-based narratives about event sequences. Its design reflects a recently proposed timeline design space, which itself is grounded in an extensive survey. In this paper, we highlight its capabilities and reflect upon its usage and adoption.

© 2019 Copyright held by the owner/author(s).

BI Power Hour

The Power BI, Excel, PowerApps, and Flow teams are excited to once again present the BI Power Hour. In this entertaining session, we will dazzle you with new demos that expose the lighter side of business intelligence and show off the flexibility and power of the Microsoft BI Platform. If you’ve never been to a Power Hour session, you definitely don’t want to miss it! We promise you’ll walk away impressed.

Follow us on Twitter – https://x.com/mspowerbi  (opens in new tab)

More questions? Try asking the Power BI Community @ https://community.powerbi.com/ (opens in new tab)

Timeline Storyteller custom visual for Power BI

Timeline Storyteller (opens in new tab), a new custom visual for Power BI I created with a team of other researchers at Microsoft, is now available in the Office Store for anyone to use.