5 ms·

Automating XKCD-Style Narrative Charts

91 points by r0muald 11y ago

yegle 11y ago
A narrative of https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_You_Zombies https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_You_Zombies would be interesting.
hitekker 11y ago
Direct link to library: https://github.com/abcnews/d3-layout-narrative https://github.com/abcnews/d3-layout-narrative. Neat stuff: I will see if it has utility for planning out my own writing.
chris_wot 11y ago
Damn, that example narrative chart is the who's who of either corrupt, or stupid, Australian politicians.
imkevinxu 11y ago
Shameless plug for my XKCD Graph generator http://xkcdgraphs.com/ http://xkcdgraphs.com/
- drzax 11y ago
  That's neat! Thanks for pointing it out.
jamessb 11y ago
>Like all good developers, rather than attempt to build it myself, I had a good look around to see if anyone else had attempted the same thing, and it turns out, someone had. Unfortunately, the example I found isn’t open source, so we had to build it ourselves. I came across an open source (MIT licensed) project to draw these kind of charts a few years ago: https://github.com/bhagany/nchart https://github.com/bhagany/nchart (The algorithms used by nchart and d3-layout-narrative are not the same)
- drzax 11y ago
  I remember seeing this (or something like it) around the time I embarked on my project. Unfortunately, I needed a JS solution. Another that has be pointed out to me since talking more about my project is http://vis.cs.ucdavis.edu/~tanahashi/storylines/ http://vis.cs.ucdavis.edu/~tanahashi/storylines/ It's written in Python and looks like it produces really nice output, but I haven't had time to look at it in detail yet.
fizixer 11y ago
Also, JakeVDP did xkcd-style plots [0] in 2012 (and I think now they're bundled as part of the IPython/Jupyter/Matplotlib/Anaconda package). [0] https://jakevdp.github.io/blog/2012/10/07/xkcd-style-plots-in-matplotlib/ https://jakevdp.github.io/blog/2012/10/07/xkcd-style-plots-i...
zellyn 11y ago
This seems like a perfect use case for human-aided layout: if you could drag things to rearrange, but the computer kept it correct, it seems like you could tweak them pretty quickly into a much better state.
pronoiac 11y ago
Here's a take on the problem from 2010: http://ogievetsky.com/PlotWeaver/ http://ogievetsky.com/PlotWeaver/ (Warning: Flash)
swinghu 11y ago
Excellent，good work

91 points by r0muald 11y ago

yegle 11y ago

A narrative of https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_You_Zombies https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_You_Zombies would be interesting.

hitekker 11y ago

Direct link to library: https://github.com/abcnews/d3-layout-narrative https://github.com/abcnews/d3-layout-narrative. Neat stuff: I will see if it has utility for planning out my own writing.

chris_wot 11y ago

Damn, that example narrative chart is the who's who of either corrupt, or stupid, Australian politicians.

imkevinxu 11y ago

Shameless plug for my XKCD Graph generator http://xkcdgraphs.com/ http://xkcdgraphs.com/

drzax 11y ago
That's neat! Thanks for pointing it out.

jamessb 11y ago

>Like all good developers, rather than attempt to build it myself, I had a good look around to see if anyone else had attempted the same thing, and it turns out, someone had. Unfortunately, the example I found isn’t open source, so we had to build it ourselves. I came across an open source (MIT licensed) project to draw these kind of charts a few years ago: https://github.com/bhagany/nchart https://github.com/bhagany/nchart (The algorithms used by nchart and d3-layout-narrative are not the same)

drzax 11y ago
I remember seeing this (or something like it) around the time I embarked on my project. Unfortunately, I needed a JS solution. Another that has be pointed out to me since talking more about my project is http://vis.cs.ucdavis.edu/~tanahashi/storylines/ http://vis.cs.ucdavis.edu/~tanahashi/storylines/ It's written in Python and looks like it produces really nice output, but I haven't had time to look at it in detail yet.

fizixer 11y ago

Also, JakeVDP did xkcd-style plots [0] in 2012 (and I think now they're bundled as part of the IPython/Jupyter/Matplotlib/Anaconda package). [0] https://jakevdp.github.io/blog/2012/10/07/xkcd-style-plots-in-matplotlib/ https://jakevdp.github.io/blog/2012/10/07/xkcd-style-plots-i...

zellyn 11y ago

This seems like a perfect use case for human-aided layout: if you could drag things to rearrange, but the computer kept it correct, it seems like you could tweak them pretty quickly into a much better state.

pronoiac 11y ago

Here's a take on the problem from 2010: http://ogievetsky.com/PlotWeaver/ http://ogievetsky.com/PlotWeaver/ (Warning: Flash)

swinghu 11y ago

Excellent，good work