Once Upon a Time in a Land Far Away: Guidelines for Spatio-Temporal Narrative Visualization

Creating a visualization that conveys a narrative requires choosing the dimensions and features that help tell the story. Time and space are two of these storytelling attributes which are commonly present in the story's structure. Thus, these should be considered in the creation process. Narrative Visualization is still a new field in Information Visualization research, and while there are guidelines for designing visualizations, specific ones for this new area are still lacking. Therefore, supported by previous research on broad recommendations for designing visualizations, we propose a specific set of guidelines to structure effective visual narratives divided into four decision categories: Intent, Spatio-temporal, Interaction, and Narrative Elements.