Automating XKCD-Style Narrative Charts | Hacker News Reader

Automating XKCD-Style Narrative Charts

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91 pointsr0muald11 comments

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

That's neat! Thanks for pointing it out.

>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

(The algorithms used by nchart and d3-layout-narrative are not the same)

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/

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.

Direct link to library:

https://github.com/abcnews/d3-layout-narrative.

Neat stuff: I will see if it has utility for planning out my own writing.

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

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-i...

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.

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

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

Excellent，good work

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