EAGER: Collaborative Research: Visualizing Event Dynamics with Narrative Animation

发现和理解隐藏在文本语料库中的事件的时间演化是知识发现的一项复杂而关键的任务。虽然挖掘事件动力学已经成为一个重要的研究课题，导致了许多成功的算法，但研究人员、研发经理、情报分析师和普通公众仍然迫切需要有效的工具来探索进化趋势和模式。这个探索性的项目专注于开发和验证一种名为叙事动画的新想法。叙事性动画使用动画可视化来讲述、探索和分享在时间演变的文本集合中传达的事件动态。电影艺术技术被用来在信息组织和变化检测中利用动画可视化，目的是增强分析能力和用户参与度。一个名为CityStories的原型系统正在开发中，以从基于网络的文本中生成城市事件的叙事动画。如果这项新颖的、有风险的研究成功，它将有望在叙事动画方面产生基础性成果，通过开发使用动画在大规模呈现和分析动态抽象数据方面的新技术，推动当前信息可视化和视觉分析的范式。试点系统CityStories系统预计将为教育、娱乐和数据分析提供一个新颖的网络平台。它将吸引普通用户，如学生、教师、记者、博客作者和许多其他人参与网络信息可视化和研究。这项研究的结果将通过出版物、万维网以及与研究人员和分析人员的合作进行传播。项目网站(http://coitweb.uncc.edu/~jyang13/narrativeanimation/narrativeanimation.htm)将包括研究成果、出版物、开发的软件、视频和数据集，供公众广泛传播。

Discovering and understanding the temporal evolution of events hidden in text corpora is a complex yet critical task for knowledge discovery. Although mining event dynamics has been an important research topic leading to many successful algorithms, researchers, research and development managers, intelligence analysts and the general public are still in dire need of effective tools to explore the evolutionary trends and patterns. This exploratory project focuses on developing and validating a novel idea called narrative animation. Narrative animation uses animated visualizations to narrate, explore, and share event dynamics conveyed in temporally evolving text collections. Film art techniques are employed to leverage the animated visualizations in information organization and change detection, with the goals of enhancing analytical power and user engagement. A prototype system called CityStories is being developed to generate narrative animations of events in cities derived from web-based text. If this novel, risky research is successful, it is expected to yield fundamental results in narrative animation that can advance the current paradigm in information visualization and visual analytics by developing novel techniques in using animations for presenting and analyzing dynamic abstract data at a large scale. The pilot system CityStories system is expected provide a novel network platform for education, entertainment, and data analytics. It will engage general users such as students, teachers, journalists, bloggers, and many others in web information visualization and study. Results of this research will be disseminated through publications, the World Wide Web, and collaborations with researchers and analysts. The project web site (http://coitweb.uncc.edu/~jyang13/narrativeanimation/narrativeanimation.htm) will include research outcomes, publications, developed software, videos, and datasets for wide dissemination to public.