VIStory: interactive storyboard for exploring visual information in scientific publications

Many visual analytics have been developed for examining scientific publications comprising wealthy data such as authors and citations. The studies provide unprecedented insights on a variety of applications, e.g., literature review and collaboration analysis. However, visual information (e.g., figures) that is widely employed for storytelling and methods description are often neglected. We present VIStory, an interactive storyboard for exploring visual information in scientific publications. We harvest a new dataset of a large corpora of figures, using an automatic figure extraction method. Each figure contains various attributes such as dominant color and width/height ratio, together with faceted metadata of the publication including venues, authors, and keywords. To depict these information, we develop an intuitive interface consisting of three components: (1) Faceted View enables efficient query by publication metadata, benefiting from a nested table structure, (2) Storyboard View arranges paper rings—a well-designed glyph for depicting figure attributes, in a themeriver layout to reveal temporal trends, and (3) Endgame View presents a highlighted figure together with the publication metadata. We illustrate the applicability of VIStory with case studies on two datasets, i.e., 10-year IEEE VIS publications, and publications by a research team at CVPR, ICCV, and ECCV conferences. Quantitative and qualitative results from a formal user study demonstrate the efficiency of VIStory in exploring visual information in scientific publications.