Every Thing Can Be a Hero! Narrative Visualization of Person, Object, and Other Biographies

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

This paper presents a platform produced during the InTaVia project to facilitate  creating stories based on people and objects by integrating the database, visualisations and multimedia. The platforms seems to be impressive, providing access to a large database, and supporting both exploration and content creation. I detail here what I believe are the strengths and weaknesses of the paper:

Strengths of the paper

- The paper is very clear and well written. The introduction is very clear and the motivation is convincing. Being able to have 'multi-hero' stories based on only one platform that enables users to search for data, explore it and create stories based on it would be very useful to take advantage of the available digital humanities data.

- The authors present three components of the platform that seem to cover the whole workflow from data search and manipulation to interactive stories. It is an impressive technical work.

- The authors present four case studies of videos created using the InTaVia platform. The resulting stories seem convincing.

- The authors discuss possible research perspectives of their work. I think the discussion about stories of humans vs objects is particularly interesting, as it raises questions on what makes an history interesting and how stories creators can make their stories more attractive.

Weaknesses

- Even if the idea of the paper is very interesting, and the platform seems very useful, all components are described at a high-level and it is difficult to understand exactly how the system works, and thus I think it is difficult to know how easy it is for a user to complete the platform workflow. I would suggest the authors to include more images of the system, a video of how it works and the possibilities it provides or even the link to the platform, to know for example how are the animations between slides defined, or the different ways the user can arrange the information. Also I would suggest to explain how the system was designed, if for example there were final users involved in the process. 

- The research questions of the paper seem to cover the data management, exploration, and stories creation but describe more in detail the story editor. I would suggest stating more clearly that the focus will be in this part if it is the case, or further describing the visual analytics studio if this is also an important part of the contribution. 

- The use cases are good examples of what can be done with the system, but I think it would be useful to discuss if the platform was tested with final users, to validate its usability.

- Furthermore, I would suggest the authors to discuss about visualizations scalability, for example what happens if we depict multiple timelines in different parts of the world, or if many events occur in a small geographical area. 

Summary: I think this paper presents a valuable contribution: a platform that supports the complete workflow from data manipulation to editing stories about persons and objects. The platforms seems impressive. However, I think the paper could be strengthened by including more details about the system and its capabilities. 

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

I suggest minor reviews related to the presentation of the tool.

Section 3 - Page 5 - Lines 203-208:

- Consider separating the description of each section by a `;`.

Page 7 - Line 257:

- Should "Various clustering methods" be "Visual aggregation methods"?

Page 7 - Lines 254 - 262

- It would be useful to link the descriptions with the visualization. E.g., provide a case where the visual aggregation method reduces visual clustering (please provide reference to a Figure).

Section 3.4

- It is difficult to localize the components on the view described in the section. Please try to highlight with annotations on the image or other way you find relevant.

Section 4:

- It is hard to follow how the tool helps on the use cases since no references to the figures are made.

The only comment regarding the quality of English language is related to the Abstract. The Abstract seem very dense and I would suggest a revision to make sentences more connected to each other.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf