Some visualisations of stories and narratives

Timelines are pretty common visualisations, there’s a lovely history of them here from Cabinet Magazine. My current project is looking at representing narratives and drama online and as part of this I’ve been researching existing visualisations of narratives and stories, some of which I’ve collated below along with my own sketches and thoughts. They’re in approximate order of complexity and we start off with some relatively simple hand-drawn diagrams illustrating general plot features.

The Archers

A hand-drawn diagram from one of the scriptwriters on The Archers radio drama. It shows the intensity of the storyline for each character over the week.

x: time, y: intensity of story, a line per character

Cinderella

Another hand-drawn diagram, this from Kurt Vonnegut in his book, Palm Sunday discovered via this post. He shows the Good or Ill fortune of the protagonist over the duration of the story. The steps up represent the gifts from Fairy Godmother to Cinderella culminating in a plunge at the stroke of midnight when everything changes back again, but then the prince finds here and she lives happily ever after (tends to infinity).

x: time, y: fortune

Tristram Shandy

Illustrations from Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne circa 1760. Described by Cabinet Magazine as “indicating the non-linear path of a well-told story; narrative digressions appear as deviations from a straight line.”.

x: time, y: digression

Napoleon’s invasion of Russia

The classic infographic from Charles Minardi, “Carte figurative de pertes successives en hommes de l’Armée Française dans la campagne de Russie 1812-1813” represents the story of Napoleon’s march into Russia and shows location, time and his army size.

x/y: map, width: size of the army, annotations: events and temperature

Now onto some interpretations of plot and episode structures.

Hill Street Blues

Diagrams from Steven Johnson’s Everything Bad is Good for You illustrating the increase in complexity of contemporary television drama and the evolution of multiple storylines. The featured image shows a Hill Street Blues episode with each grid square representing a scene and each row representing an individual storyline.

x: time/scenes, y: storyline

Jazz on 3

Following on from Steven Johnson’s diagrams I drew these a few years ago showing the fractal-like nature of nested events in TV and shows. “The radio show (Jazz on 3 in this instance) can be broken down into segments - the introduction, a discussion of the artist, interviews and a live session. Each of these segments is further broken down (in green) into the individual interviews and the individual tracks.”. This could also apply to TV and radio drama.

x: time, y: scenes

The Archers again

This comes from a project a couple of years ago to build a web app that segmented the Archers radio drama into individual scenes and marked up each one with relevant facets. This diagram illustrates how the episodes are split up and how ongoing storylines would thread their way through the episodes.

x/y: time/episodes/scenes, annotations: facets and storylines

Movie narrative charts

And then there’s this classic from xkcd to “…show movie character interactions. The horizontal axis is time. The vertical grouping of the lines indicate which characters are together at a given time.”. The Lord of the Rings diagram is beautifully constructed to simultaneously show time, character groupings and major locations and events.

x: time, y: character and groups, annotations: places and events

Stories are rendered as TV Programmes

I recently drew this after considering TV drama and how a show is a particular rendering of a story into the form of TV. The conceptual story happens along a timeline with significant plot events marked. These events are then rendered in scenes in the TV programme thereby creating a programme timeline. But sometimes events may be portrayed in multiple scenes, as flashbacks or different points of view for example. And sometimes a single scene on the TV may portray multiple narrative events. An ongoing story arc comprises many events in the timeline from many episodes.

x: time, y: rendering, annotations: connections and storylines

Memento

The film Memento is a particularly good example of using a complicated structure to create a compelling story and Density Design have created this set of visualisations based on it. The example above has slices showing the order of the scenes in the film and then the same scenes re-ordered as they would have been experienced by the protagonist. This diagram is also interesting and shows character involvement as a coloured bar in each scene, ordered both by film- and real-time.

x: time, re-ordered by film or real timeline, colour: b&w or colour scene

Now let’s have a look at some time travelling stories which makes things a bit more complicated…

Doctor Who: Blink

This diagram comes from my colleague Paul Rissen who has been doing some very deep thinking about modelling narratives in data. It is based on events from the Doctor Who episode Blink) that features characters being thrown back in time. The diagram shows various timelines from the show - the timeline from the perspective of the main character, Sally (which is the same as the timeline shown in the broadcast episode), the universe timeline (i.e. how events occurred in linear time and different from the episode) and the timelines of various other characters who time travel in the episode and thus experience events in a different order.

x: time/scene (re-ordered by character), annotations: connections

Time travel from fiction

An original work from Information is Beautiful showing all the time travel in various films and books on a single timeline.

Universe timeline, annotations: time travel

George Bush

Ben Fry talks about these complex hand-drawn depictions by Mark Lombardi of “social/commercial interactions and their hierarchies, and politics” where “…he began to create drawings such as this one to depict the complex narratives he would uncover through his curiosity about anything from failed banks to corruption in government to organized crime.”. This one shows the investments and relationships of George W Bush. An interesting combination of a timeline and complex relationships.

x: time, annotations: relationships and connections

Jules et Jim

Finally, another set of film visualisations from Density Design based the the film Jules et Jim. The one shown above uses the curve of the storyline to represent the feelings and involvement of the three characters. There are lots of others in the set.

x/y: storyline and feelings, colour: involvement

I’m particularly taken right now with the very simple illustrations of the shape of the story from Kurt Vonnegut and I’d like to incorporate something like that into our project. And time travel also gives you a lot more to play with. Have you seen any more story visualisations that you like? Please add them in the comments below.

Books read in 2009

This is the third year I’ve done this. Overall I read 14 fiction and 17 non-fiction, 31 in total. I reckon that’s about 60-70cm of bookshelf per year, which btw is overfull, any bookcase recommendations appreciated. To save you reading the whole list my favourite books of 2009 were Anathem by Neal Stephenson for fiction, The Ongoing Moment by Geoff Dyer for non-fiction and a special mention for What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Haruki Murakami if you do any running. Here’s the full list, this time they’re in the order I read them.

Tokyo Year Zero (Tokyo Trilogy 1) by David Pearce
4*. Atmospheric crime thriller set in Japan immediately after the war ended.

Heat by George Monbiot
4*. Good overview of the issues and a set of good solutions. Still very worrying that we’re not doing anything about any of it.

The Blank Slate by Steven Pinker
4*. Always interesting

A Florentine Death by Michele Giuttari
3*. Crime novel set in Florence written by an Italian policeman.

Gemma Bovery by Posy Simmonds
4*. Funny and sad

The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga
4*. Good story, memorable character.

Psychogeography by Will Self
4*. Excellent compendium of his interesting and funny pyschogeography essays. I think I enjoyed this more than when I read the odd one in the paper.

Perdido Street Station by China Mieville
3* . Good story, I just don’t really like fantasy as a genre.

Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain by Oliver Sacks
-. Didn’t finish, a bit disjointed.

Pattern Recognition by William Gibson
4*. Good to read on the flight between London and Tokyo.

Hokkaido Highway Blues: Hitchhiking Japan by Will Ferguson
2*. Easy read with lots of anecdotes about Japan, nothing more than that.

Cities by John Reader
4*. Really good book about cities, where they came from and what they do. From the table of contents it looked like it might be a linear history but much more interesting than that. “The human gait is inefficient, on a par with penguins.”

The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein by Peter Ackroyd
2*. Dunno, just not the best book to read in the hottest week of the year.

The Ascent of Money by Niall Ferguson
4*. OK, I reckon if I read this again I’ll probably nearly understand the building blocks of the world’s financial system. I’m a bit financially illiterate and this made sense. “The concept of interest was probably derived from the natural increase of a herd of livestock”

Hertzian Tales by Anthony Dunne
3*. Interesting things but a bit too conceptual to be useful. “I use the term ‘genotype’ as an alternative to ‘prototype’ to shift importance away from whether or not a conceptual design technically works, to the ideas it represents”

Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood
4*. Post-apocalyptic tale of GM gone wrong.

The Craftsman by Richard Sennett
4*. Wide-ranging book on craft and craftsmen, it was an interesting read, possibly with a few too many confusing metaphors, but lots of fascinating anecdotes and useful thoughts. I blogged about what it has to say about innovation

A Certain Justice by P.D. James
3*. Standard PD James and Inspector Dalgliesh.

Batman: Year One by Frank Miller
3*. Seemed surprisingly close to the film, if I remember it correctly, though it concentrates on Lieutenant Gordon.

What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Haruki Murakami
5*. Anecdotes about his life and what running means. Loved it.

V for Vendetta by Alan Moore.
3*. Again, seemed surprisingly close to the film.

Shapes: Nature’s patterns by Philip Ball.
3*. OK, not as inspiring as I hoped, and not enough detail for me to try simulating things.

The Age of Wonder by Richard Holmes
3*. It took me a while as it was a massive hardback that I didn’t want to carry back and forth in my bag everyday but an interesting journey through ballooning, astronomy and other 18th century science and the beginning of the Royal Society.

A Pale View of Hills by Kazuo Ishiguro
4*. Perfectly formed little book. How do you interpret the ending?

Status Anxiety by Alain de Botton.
4*. Brief look at how people and societies have dealt with status.

Anathem by Neal Stephenson
5*. Immense story of an alternative universe featuring 1000-year old philosophers.

The Ongoing Moment by Geoff Dyer.
5*. I know nothing about American photographers and this was fascinating. Loved his way of drawing connections between photos and photographers.

Wildwood: A Journey Through Trees by Roger Deakin.
4*. Made me want to visit forests. And buy a tree identification guide.

Matter by Iain M. Banks
4*. Latest Culture novel, I read some a few years ago and enjoyed coming back.

Performing Rites: Evaluating Popular Music by Simon Frith.
3*. For work, I’m interested in how people describe their musical taste. Fairly readable for an academic book.

The Secret Life of Birds by Colin Tudge.
3*. Avian equivalent to Wildwood above. Now know lots of useless facts. For instance, squirrels rotate their rear ankles 180 degrees when climbing down trees.

I also quickly re-read The Plenitude by Rich Gold and blogged about what it has to say about innovation

2010 was brought in by What The Dog Saw by Malcolm Gladwell and on the stack for 2010 are The Patient by PD James , Nocturnes by Kazuo Ishiguro, Staring at the Sun by Julian Barnes and The Nature of Technology by W. Brian Arthur.

All reading was tracked by the marvellous bkkeepr and graphed by the velocity of reading, which tells me my last 20 books, with 6936 pages in total, were read in 215 days. There was an average of 346 pages per book. That’s about 32 pages per day (or 1.34 pages per hour).

Reviewing electricity usage in 2009

Timelapse movie of electricity usage during one day (more detail)

I've also been collecting my electricity usage during 2009 using a Current Cost smart electricity meter. I don't have it connected up to a computer all the time as that would require me to leave a computer on, somewhat self-defeatingly, so I had to regularly grab the data every 30 days or so. There are a couple of graphs below and the data used for the graphs is available for download in the unlikely occurrence that you'd like to use it.

This is the year graphed as daily kWh (kilowatt hours) readings in grey with a moving average superimposed in green. The zeros in the daily graph are days when I don't have any reading.

And this is the total usage in kWh per month.



There are other graphs I've made here, more information on how to get data out of a Current Cost in this post and more about our typical electricity usage here. Data gathered using one of these...

Listening to the radio in 2009

In a possibly foolish feat of dedication I spent 2009 adding (almost) all of my radio listening to the BBC Radio Labs prototype, Radio Pop. The principle use of Radio Pop is to track online listening, but as most of my listening is done on DAB radios and podcasts I used the manual update feature of Radio Pop every few days to regularly add my listening. You can browse my complete profile at http://www.radiopop.co.uk/users/tristanf. As you can see I mostly listen to BBC Radio 4.

As 2009 is now over I've extracted all this data using the Radio Pop API, some Python scripts and a spreadsheet and this is what I found.

In total I listened to 1021 individual programmes for 633 hours and 17 minutes.



I listened to Radio 4 for 35,140 minutes over 974 individual programmes
I listened to Five Live for 1860 minutes over 31 programmes
I listened to Radio 1 for 417 minutes over 4 programmes
I listened to Radio 3 for 326 minutes over 5 programmes
I listened to Five Live Sports Extra for 228 minutes over 5 programmes
I listened to 6 Music for 24 minutes over 1 programme
I listened to the World Service for 2 minutes over 1 programme

(35,140 minutes is around 586 hours or an entire 24 and a half days listening to Radio 4.)

My top 20 most listened to programmes for 2009 were...

1. Today for 8712 minutes over 215 episodes
2. Saturday Live for 1795 minutes over 32 episodes
3. Any Questions? for 1479 minutes over 30 episodes
4. The Archers Omnibus for 1465 minutes over 20 episodes
5. In Our Time for 1335 minutes over 31 episodes
6. Woman's Hour for 1262 minutes over 22 episodes
7. Afternoon Play for 1041 minutes over 23 episodes
8. Saturday Play for 990 minutes over 15 episodes
9. Broadcasting House for 984 minutes over 18 episodes
10. Kermode and Mayo's Film Review for 960 minutes over 16 episodes
11. Pick of the Week for 927 minutes over 22 episodes
12. Simon Mayo for 900 minutes over 15 episodes
13. Desert Island Discs for 855 minutes over 19 episodes
14. The Archers for 705 minutes over 47 episodes
15. The Now Show for 636 minutes over 22 episodes
16. Front Row for 595 minutes over 22 episodes
17. The News Quiz for 549 minutes over 19 episodes
18. Classic Serial for 540 minutes over 9 episodes
19. Excess Baggage for 420 minutes over 14 episodes
20. Gilles Peterson for 417 minutes over 4 episodes

And then splitting all the listening data per day over the entire year gives the graph at the top of this post. The big gaps every now and then are mainly holidays. The regular cycle of spikes are weekends, when I tend to listen most.

It doesn't quite represent all my listening as I wasn't religious over doing this every day. It certainly misses out some podcasts which I listened to well after the broadcast date (mainly the excellent Thinking Allowed) and it's all BBC, but that's the only radio I listen to anyway. Whilst I was writing this up I discovered Dale Lane's excellent statistics of his TV viewing, which looks much more automated than my data gathering. But ideally we want this automatically aggregated and collated for us, just BBC TV and radio would be good enough for me at first. Obviously internet-connected radios and TV, from Olinda to the Sensia and iPlayer to Project Canvas, have the potential to do this but we'll need large-scale open systems from projects like RadioDNS, NoTube and URIPlay to get us to that personal media informatics utopia.

Mooso and moving forwards

We’ve just launched the latest Radio Labs prototype, Mooso. It’s a game to play while listening to BBC 6 Music radio, enter tags to describe the current song and score points if you match other players. Sign up and play here or read more about Mooso on the Radio Labs blog.

But this is the end of an era, or something like that, as Chris and I have left BBC Audio & Music and are now part of the Prototyping team at BBC R&D where I'm the lead producer. Soon after we formed the A&M R&D team we held a planning week and scoped out four major project areas for us to tackle. One was around presence, attention and socialness for radio - this became Radio Pop and Olinda, another was around live events which became an internal-only prototype of a social gig attendance site, the third explored how the web could create new forms of radio content which evolved into the work we did exploring chopping up the Archers narrative and the final area aimed to develop new ways of music discovery. This final brief, combined with our interest in games, became Mooso. It’s certainly satisfying to have completed these four major prototypes, as well as lots of other things along the way including (with the help of James) setting up the Radio Labs blog.

These have been good times but the new team is just as awesome and I’m already knee-deep in many exciting projects, from representing narratives on the web to a number of possible prototypes around digital music. And hopefully, when I get some time, I’ll be writing about them either here, on Radio Labs or on the new R&D blog.