Narrative visualization: Taxonomy, methodologies, challenges, and opportunities

Narrative visualization is a method for conveying data or information in an engaging storytelling form using interactive visualizations. This method integrates storytelling and visualization techniques to represent information through organized narratives for effective communication. Narrative visualization has gained increasing interest in many data-driven domains like business, healthcare, governance, and education. However, the literature indicates limited insights and organization regarding advances in narrative visualization, particularly in its design elements and methodologies. This survey paper aims to present a comprehensive overview of the taxonomy, methodologies, challenges, and emerging opportunities in recent narrative visualization research. The paper firstly introduces the fundamental concepts of narrative visualization and its application trends across domains. Emerging trends and taxonomy were derived from the survey to provide an overview of advances in narrative visualization. The derived taxonomy classifies narrative visualization works with regards to the types of design, genre, narrative, and enabler technologies. Next, summarizations of common methodologies adopted by recent works particularly on design requirement identification and design evaluation are presented. Subsequently, major challenges addressed by recent works are classified based on three aspects: application, performance, and technical. Lastly, this survey highlights the emerging opportunities in narrative visualizations for future undertaking or exploration by the visualization community. The findings presented in this paper can offer significant advantages for both visualization practitioners and researchers in generating effective narrative visualization solutions.