Timeline Storyteller is an open-source expressive visual storytelling environment for presenting timelines in the browser or in Microsoft Power BI.
Use it to present different aspects of timeline data using a palette of timeline representations, scales, and layouts, as well as controls for filtering, highlighting, and annotation.
Here is an interactive story produced with the Timeline Storyteller custom visual for Power BI, a story about the champions of the US Open golf tournament. For another interactive story produced with the Timeline Storyteller for Power BI, see this story about the history of artificial intelligence.
For more inspiration, see our gallery
of timelines spanning the timeline design space as well as videos of timeline
stories.
Also watch these videos of Timeline Storyteller in the 2017 Microsoft Data Insights Summit keynote and during the summit's BI Power Hour.
Timeline Storyteller for the web currently supports datasets of events in CSV, JSON, or Google Spreadsheet format, while Timeline Storyteller for Power BI supports datasets of events in any format that Power BI can ingest; please see this tutorial for loading data into Timeline Storyteller for Power BI.
Each event is specified by the following attributes:
start_date, a date formatted as YYYY,
YYYY-MM-DD, or YYYY-MM-DD HH:MMZ (Z necessary for specifying UTC, otherwise HH:MM will
be time-zone dependent). BC dates are permitted, e.g., -27, -13800000000.end_date, a date using same format as
start_date.category, a string corresponding to the category
of the event (which Timeline Storyteller encodes as colour).facet, a string corresponding to another
category of the event (which Timeline Storyteller uses to create a faceted timeline
layout; category and facet can be identical if desired).content_text, a string description of the event
(which Timeline Storyteller exposes as event annotations).
{
"start_date":"1775",
"end_date":"1783",
"content_text":"American Revolutionary War.",
"facet":"North America",
"category":"North America"
},
{
"facet":"Hugo, Victor",
"category":"other",
"start_date":"2015-07-10 11:00Z",
"end_date":"2015-07-10 11:59Z",
"content_text":"Taking an ice bath on the roof"
},
{
"content_text":"Human ancestors walk upright",
"start_date":"-4200000",
"end_date":""
},
The "The Daily Routines of Famous Creative People" demo dataset used in Timeline Storyteller:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1x8N7Z9RUrA9Jmc38Rvw1VkHslp8rgV2Ws3h_5iM-I8M/pubhtml
start_date and end_date columns are formatted as
text and not as dates (e.g., '1926-06-29).dailyroutinesTo use Timeline Storyteller for Power BI, watch this tutorial.
To use Timeline Storyteller in the browser, follow these steps:
content_text label; resize
and reposition these labels; SHIFT + click to highlight events without showing
label.
Timeline Storyteller was developed at Microsoft Research and deployed as an Azure web app.
This is an open source project released under a MIT license. Contribute to this project by submitting issues and pull requests at github.com/Microsoft/timelinestoryteller.
To learn more about the Microsoft Research project that informed the design of Timeline Storyteller, see timelinesrevisited.github.io, which includes a survey of timeline tools and more than 200 bespoke timelines.
If you use Timeline Storyteller to make a timeline for a research paper, you can cite us in two ways. You can cite the tool itself:
@misc{TimelineStoryteller,
author = {Matthew Brehmer and Bongshin Lee and Nathalie Henry Riche and Darren Edge and Christopher White and Kate Lytvynets and David Tittsworth},
title = {Microsoft Timeline Storyteller},
year = {2017},
note = {\url{https://timelinestoryteller.com}}
}
Or you can cite our recent journal paper about the timeline design space:
@article{Brehmer2016,
author = {Matthew Brehmer and Bongshin Lee and Benjamin Bach and Nathalie Henry Riche and Tamara Munzner},
title = {Timelines Revisited: A Design Space and Considerations for Expressive Storytelling},
journal = {IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (TVCG)},
year = {2017},
volume = {23},
issue = {9},
pages = {2151--2164},
doi = {10.1109/TVCG.2016.2614803},
ISSN = {1077-2626}
}