PlotThread: Creating Expressive Storyline Visualizations using Reinforcement Learning.

Storyline visualizations are an effective means to present the evolution of plots and reveal the scenic interactions among characters. However, the design of storyline visualizations is a difficult task as users need to balance between aesthetic goals and narrative constraints. Despite that the optimization-based methods have been improved significantly in terms of producing aesthetic and legible layouts, the existing (semi-) automatic methods are still limited regarding 1) efficient exploration of the storyline design space and 2) flexible customization of storyline layouts.