The Visualization of Drama Hierarchies

Vincenzo Lombardo

and Antonio Pizzo

Dipartimento di Informatica and CIRMA, Universit

a di Torino, corso Svizzera 185, Torino, Italy

Dipartimento di Studi Umanistici and CIRMA, Universit

a di Torino, corso Svizzera 185, Torino, Italy

Keywords:

Hierarchy Visualization, Drama, Sequence.

Abstract:

Drama, the art that displays characters performing live actions in telling a story, is pervasive in cultures and

media. The study of drama often resorts to hierarchical structures to explain the sequences of incidents that

occur. Hierarchies provide an explanation of why incidents are in the sequence or cluster elements into sub-

sequences that form a meaningful structure. This paper addresses the visualization of drama hierarchies. The

paper inspects the peculiar features of drama hierarchies and proposes a visualization built upon the metaphors

of tree mapping and timeline, respectively. The visualizations are preliminarily applied in tasks of analysis

and interpretation in supporting teaching and research of drama scholars.

1 INTRODUCTION

It often happens, in science and humanities, that phe-

nomena occur as sequences that are spanned by some

hierarchical structure. This means that the sequence

is the left–to–right collection of the leaves of the hier-

archical structure, although the sequence exists on its

own. In this paper, we address the hierarchic structure

of drama linear incidents, as formulated with differ-

ent goals by (Freytag, 2004), (Lavandier, 1994), and

(Lombardo and Pizzo, 2013). As we will see, drama

consists of units, that are mini dramas, and these in

turn consist of more and more reduced dramas until

the elementary advancement of the plot through some

speciﬁc incident.

Sequences (often timelines) and hierarchies have

received much attention in the visualization litera-

ture. Timeline has been one of the most addressed

visual metaphors (see the book (Aigner et al., 2011)

for a survey (http://survey.timeviz.net, visited Decem-

ber 2014); trees have been the object of several ap-

proaches of information visualization (Schulz, 2011).

Node-link, nested squares or circles, horizontal and

vertical adjacency, indented–list, and matrix represen-

tations are well known in the literature, each with spe-

ciﬁc advantages and disadvantages, depending on the

task at hand. For example, containment (or nested)

approaches have the advantage of a bounded space

but leave no room for node content visualization.

However, the theme of introducing in the same vi-

sualization space both hierarchies and sequences, as it

is the case for drama, has been neglected. This type of

visualization poses a number of challenges that need

a customization of the approaches above: both the

(unique) sequence and the (multiple) hierarchies have

an existence of their own, respectively, with elements

in the sequence and elements in the hierarchy aligned

along some dimension; also, for purposes of theory

incompleteness, it can happen that some elements of

the sequence are not spanned by any element in the

hierarchy and that some element predicted by the hi-

erarchy is not mapped onto any element in the se-

quence; ﬁnally, we have that multiple hierarchies can

span the same sequence, providing alternative expla-

nations. All these issues are of interest for the scholar

and the teacher of drama.

In this paper, we address the issue of visualizing

both the sequence and the hierarchies that span it in

the same visual space, applied to the speciﬁc case of

drama hierarchies. We introduce the generic chal-

lenges of such a combined visualization. We take

as input a formal representation of dramatic media

objects, that encodes the sequence of incidents of a

drama as well as a number of hierarchies that pro-

vide an explanation of the dramatic facts, and we de-

velop an algorithm for the representation of both the

incident sequence and the structure hierarchies in the

same visual space. Finally, we address the effective-

ness of the visualization in research and teaching of

drama in speciﬁc phenomena of interest.

163

Lombardo V. and Pizzo A..

The Visualization of Drama Hierarchies.

DOI: 10.5220/0005314801630170

In Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Information Visualization Theory and Applications (IVAPP-2015), pages 163-170

ISBN: 978-989-758-088-8

 2015 SCITEPRESS (Science and Technology Publications, Lda.)

2 INCIDENT SEQUENCE AND

DRAMA HIERARCHIES

Storytelling is a pervasive activity across all cultures

and ages, especially in its dramatic form (Mamet,

1998). In western culture, storytelling has taken many

different forms, from fairytales to TV ﬁction, surviv-

ing the transformations occurred to media. Esslin

(Esslin, 1987) deﬁnes “dramatic media” those that

display characters performing live actions, such as

theatre, cinema and videogames. The notion of

“story” is widely acknowledged as the construction

of an incident sequence that, abstracting from the the-

atrical or cinematographic properties, is motivated by

the cause–effect chain (Rimmon-Kenan, 1983); this

chain results from a complex interplay among agents,

events, and environments, well known in playwriting

techniques (Egri, 1946). Drama is a speciﬁc form of

storytelling made prevalently by character’s actions

after a deliberation process. Thus, drama is normally

perceived as a sequence of actions and events, and

the audience have to make sense out of this sequence.

In other words, we see a list of actions without the

description length that is available in a novel; never-

theless, we are engaged in a complex cognitive activ-

ity to reconstruct the plot and the sense behind those

actions and events. It is this sequence of incidents,

that is released by a playwright, possibly organized

into parts, that are called scenes, that are variable for

size or importance or both. Normally drama are di-

vided in acts and scenes: the former born out of the

need of set changes, the latter born out of the need

of character’s entrances and exits. This organization

has been kept as standard also when those needs no

longer hold, and still shapes most of contemporary

drama. Thus, a scene is considered a part of an act,

and the sequence of scenes also contributes to deﬁne

the rhythm of the play. In order to account for this

sequence and to visualize the length of the drama, in

our running example we measure the single elements

in our timeline by counting the number of verses of

the text.

Drama can be summarized as a group of speciﬁc

features, that can be deﬁned more or less precisely.

These features refer to the identiﬁable elements in

Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet as well as in Tom

Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead,

in HBO’s Sopranos and even in some reality show,

such as CBS’s Survivors, and, ﬁnally, in some fa-

mous videogame such as Rockstar Games’ L.A. Noir

or Ubisoft’s Assassin Creeds’ series. Drama schol-

ars have developed a number of approaches to dra-

matic texts and theatrical plays (Carlson, 1984). The

“technical point of view” relies on the so–called con-

structivist approach, which departs from the linguis-

tic and literary forms to focus on the constitutive el-

ements of drama. So, focussing on how the plot de-

velops and is structurally organized, how characters

are involved in the actions, what conﬂicts take place,

drama studies acknowledge the existence of hierar-

chies that span the sequence of incidents. Within

this framework, in particular, the analyses of La-

vandier (Lavandier, 1994), Ryngaert (Ryngaert and

Bergez, 2008), Hatcher (Hatcher, 1996), and Spencer

(Spencer, 2002) contribute by distilling the dramatic

elements that the author has to handle in order to pro-

duce a well formed play.

As a running example we refer to Shakespeare’s

drama Hamlet. This well known drama tells the story

of the Prince of Denmark, who is contemplative and

thoughtful by nature, facing the murder of his father

(the former King) by the usurper (the King’s brother

Claudius). Hamlet devotes himself to avenging his

father’s death, and decides to fool Elsinor’s Court by

acting mad. This madness makes him able to reveal

the corruption of the court and the guilt of his uncle,

who he kills in the ﬁnal scene of the drama. Going

in depth in the plot, for the plan hierarchy case we

address the so–called “nunnery” scene in the Third

Act. In this scene, Ophelia is sent to Hamlet by Polo-

nius (her father, Lord Chamberlain) and Claudius (the

King) to conﬁrm the assumption that Hamlet’s mad-

ness is caused by his rejected love. According to the

two conspirers, Ophelia should induce him to talk

about his inner feelings. At the same time, Hamlet

tries to convince Ophelia that the court is corrupted

and she should go to a nunnery. In the middle of

the scene Hamlet puts Ophelia on a test to verify her

honesty. Because he guesses (correctly) that the two

conspirers are hidden behind the curtain, he asks the

girl to reveal where her father Polonius is. She de-

cides to lie and replies that he is at home. As a conse-

quence, Hamlet becomes very angry in realizing that

even Ophelia is corrupted and there is no hope to re-

deem the court.

The case of incident sequence spanned by drama

hierarchies poses a number of issues to be accounted

for in visualization. Now we review such issues.

2.1 Representation and Processing

Issues of Drama Hierarchies

The representation issues to be accounted for when

we need to visualize drama hierarchies that span an

incident sequence in drama are the following.

The ﬁrst issue is that the sequence and the hierar-

chies have both an existence on their own; they should

be both visualized in the same space with their own

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164

features. Sequence features a total linear order of el-

ements; so, the visualization system should represent

such an order of the incidents in a story plot. Hier-

archical structures do not necessarily pose an order

on the leaves; so the several approaches to tree lay-

out can, but not necessarily, include such an order in

the visualization; the relevant relation is dominance

over the hierarchy nodes. In our cases of interest (hi-

erarchies that span a sequence), such trees are also

projective and the leaves of the tree are left–to–right

ordered.

The second issue is the spanning relation between

the hierarchical structure and the sequence. The hier-

archy, being the result of a top–down derivation pro-

cess (as, e.g., in the case of a generative grammar) or

a clustering (e.g., email stream structuring), consists

of internal nodes, that we call non terminal symbols

(NT, as it happens in grammars), and leaves, that we

call terminal symbols (t). The hierarchy spans the se-

quence, or portions of it: this means that the leaves or

terminals of the hierarchy, map the elements of the se-

quence to some extent. The elements of the sequence

that are spanned by the leaves of the hierarchy should

be aligned in the visual representation; so, the hierar-

chy sheds some light on the formation or motivation

of the sequence portions that are mapped. For exam-

ple, in the case of drama we can see in what step of

the story we are in a certain sequence (later, we see

that it happens that multiple type of hierarchies span

a sequence of incidents, with multiple meanings).

The third issue concerns the fact that the hierarchy

projects new elements onto the sequence. In the do-

main of drama, these new elements are null elements,

e.g., unimplemented characters’ intentions in drama,

that reveal what element, predicted from the hierar-

chy, is actually omitted in the sequence (which is

perfectly legal as a naturally occurring phenomenon,

anyway).

The fourth, ﬁnal representation issue concerns the

possibility that multiple hierarchical structures span

the same sequence. This can happen for different rea-

sons. In drama studies, as we will see below, the se-

quence of the incidents develops from the projections

of the intentions of the characters; since each charac-

ter develops her/his intentions hierarchically, we have

again a forest of trees that span the same sequence;

however, in this case, the visualization does not ad-

dress several theories, but the contribution of each

character to the plot. In all these cases, the visual-

ization system must be able to distinguish the several

sources.

In addition to these four representation issues,

there exists one processing issue: the visualization

system should also work with incomplete informa-

tion; partial sequences and hierarchies allow the

users (researchers, scholars, enthusiasts) to work with

rough and partial interpretations that can be reﬁned

and ﬁxed as the theory improves. So, for example,

the scholar

In the remainder of this section, now we introduce

one speciﬁc type of drama hierarchy that spans the

incident sequence.

2.2 The Hierarchies of Characters’

Intentions

The character–centered representation of drama facts

(see (Lombardo and Pizzo, 2013)) introduces the in-

terpretation of incidents motivated by characters’ in-

tentions, i.e. plans that aim at realizing characters’

goals. Some incidents, usually a minority, can be un-

intentional events, so event that are not directly mo-

tivated by some character’s deliberation. Following

the BDI model of agent (Rao and Georgeff, 1995),

the formation of goals depends upon the beliefs of the

characters about the state of the world and about the

other characters’ mental states. Goals and beliefs are

mental states of a character.

The library of plans, organized in one or more hi-

erarchies associated with individual characters, link

goals and actions. Plans feature a tripartite struc-

ture: Preconditions, which are the states that enable

the application of the plan; Action or list of Subplans,

which are the actions to be performed to achieve some

goal; Effects, which are the states that hold after the

plan has been carried out successfully. There are base

plans, which consist of a single basic action, and re-

cursive plans, which consist of an ordered list of sub-

plans. Preconditions and effects can be mental states,

and state of affairs that hold in the story world for

the actions and plans to be executed. Higher plans

are recursively deﬁned as sequences of (sub)plans

(again bordered by states). In our running example

of the “nunnery” scene, Hamlet and Ophelia feature

conﬂicting goals: Hamlet, who initially believes that

Ophelia is honest (a belief, i.e. a mental state), in-

tends to convince her to go to a nunnery to escape the

court corruption; Ophelia, who respects her father’s

authority (a value, again a mental state), intends to

induce Hamlet to talk about his love feelings (which

should be the cause of his madness). Recursively,

these plans consist of subplans: according to the anal-

ysis in (Lombardo and Pizzo, 2013), Ophelia’s plan

to induce Hamlet to talk consists of starting by wait-

ing to meet him in some room, then greeting him as

he enters the room, then returning him the gifts he

gave her in the past (in order to stimulate in him the

reﬂection about his love for her), and then “presum-

TheVisualizationofDramaHierarchies

165

ably” keeping the topic of conversation around love

until he overtly states that his madness is caused by

her rejected love. We say “presumably” because this

plan fails, because Hamlet refuses the returned gifts

(and we do not know how it could have continued);

so, Ophelia re–plans to explicitly introduce the topic

of the conversation (Hamlet’s madness). On the other

hand, Hamlet’s plan is convince Ophelia that the court

is corrupted and then advise her to go to a nunnery.

Also Hamlet’s plan fails because Hamlet realizes that

someone, probably Polonius, is hidden behind some

curtain in the room and, so, he re-plans to put at test

Ophelia’s honesty before going back to his previous

plan of advising her a nunnery. As we know, this does

not happen, and Hamlet gives up his plan deﬁnitely.

Each high–level plan roots a plan hierarchy. The

larger the hierarchy, the longer the span of the hier-

archy onto the sequence; the higher and longer the

number of hierarchies, the more present the charac-

ter in the drama. In case two plan hierarchies, of two

different characters, hinge on the same sequence por-

tion (sometimes even spanning the same incidents)

we have a dramatic conﬂict, usually solved with the

success of one character and the failure of the other.

For example, the climax of the “nunnery” scene is

when Hamlet, who wants to ascertain Ophelia’s hon-

esty, asks her a rhetorical question (“Where is your

father?”), knowing the right answer (that he is in the

room), hoping that she replies honestly, and Ophelia

lies (“At home, my Lord.”), trading honesty for loy-

alty to her father. This conﬂict should be visualized,

to help the drama analysis.

The whole approach works by matching the ac-

tions reported in the plans with the incidents in the

sequence; in this way, each plan spans some portion

of the sequence through the alignment of actions in

the plan with actions in the sequence. However, we

can notice that each plan also introduces precondition

and effect states, to border the actions or the subplans

(which recursively are implemented through actions)

on the left and the right, respectively. The incidents

of the sequence are viewed as operators that carry

on the story development from one state to the next

one; states are projected from the plan structure onto

the sequence, augmenting the representation connect-

ing the motivations (goals and plans intended by the

characters) to the actions actually carried out. So, if

we want to visualize the story advancements through

the states that hold during the drama development, we

augment the sequence with states, as extra elements in

the sequence. Finally, it happens that some incidents

in the timeline are not the result of a planned delib-

eration of some character or the hierarchies of plans

are incomplete with respect to the sequence: in both

these cases, the visualization should mark such mis-

alignments between the hierarchies and the sequence.

3 RELATED WORK

Sequences and hierarchies have been receiving many

solutions in the visualization literature (Heer et al.,

2010) (Liu et al., 2014), with speciﬁc metaphors for

time (Aigner et al., 2011) and trees (Schulz, 2011).

The case of multiple trees spanning the same set of

basic elements (usually the leaves of a tree) has been

the object of several approaches of information visu-

alization (see the survey in (Graham and Kennedy,

2010) on single and multiple trees). Some work (Card

et al., 2006) has also addressed the problem of stitch-

ing together hierarchical structure and time into one

visualization space, in order to help an analyst under-

stand how very large hierarchies change through time;

the goal is to enable the analyst to detect patterns of

relationships. However, this approach addresses the

evolution of a hierarchy in time rather than what hier-

archies span within some timeline.

The visualization of story relations has at-

tracted the attention of visual artists and amateurs

to provide unique maps for orientation. This

is particularly useful for stories with intricate

plots that are not immediate to grasp (see, e.g.,

the visualization of two Nolan’s ﬁlms Memento,

2000, http://visual.ly/memento-scene-timeline,

visited December 2014, and Inception, 2010,

http://visual.ly/inception-timeline-visualisation, vis-

ited December 2014), but also to trace the overall

involvement of characters, visualized as horizontal

chronological lines that converge and diverge, il-

lustrating their mutual interactions as well as their

relationship in time with places and/or collective

events (see, e.g., the movie narrative charts at

http://store.xkcd.com/collections/posters/products/

movie-narrative-charts-poster, visited December

2014). The latter visual design was then automatized

through some algorithmic approaches in (Tanahashi

and Ma, 2012) and (Liu et al., 2013), with issues of

symmetry and compactness, and consequent impact

on readability of features with respect to the manual

version. Liu et al.’s work has also introduced the

issue of hierarchic information on places, which has

some loose connection with the hierarchic structures

visualized in our approach. Again, a multi-level sto-

ryline visualization method is undertaken by (Chen

et al., 2012), which organizes and synthesizes some

representative information, that includes locations,

objects, and characters, to produce a bi–dimensional

layout for movie summaries. The automatic op-

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166

erations of clusterization and classiﬁcation in the

video sequence remind of the sequence elements

in our representation, while the bi–dimensional

video–based layout could be a suitable presentation

method for the hierarchies addressed here.

On a more productive side, a number of visual

interfaces are provided with software tools that have

been developed to assist the creation and production

of dramas. For example, the writing assistant Dra-

matica Pro (http://www.writersstore.com/dramatica-

pro-story-development-software/, visited December

2014) visualizes the building blocks of a plot struc-

ture, with diagrams for plot progression and story

points, that helps the writer in controlling and bal-

ancing the tension within the story development. The

connections ﬂeshed out are useful to connect the sev-

eral professionals of the production, while leaving un-

explored the possibilities of addressing the more mo-

tivational features of the drama.

4 THE VISUALIZATION OF

DRAMATIC FACTS

The features of the problem that the visualization sys-

tem takes as input, are:

• a sequence of elements, called terminal symbols,

with the precedence relation over the elements

(see Figure 1(a));

• a number of hierarchies, based on some domi-

nance relation, such that some leaves span ele-

ments of the sequence, as exempliﬁed by Figure

1(b), with only one hierarchy, and Figure 1(c),

with two hierarchies;

• a dimension of the possible role differences for

the hierarchy elements.

These individuals and relations are annotated

manually by the scholar, the enthusiast, or the student

through a graphic interface (Lombardo and Pizzo,

2014). The internal encoding is a computational on-

tology, that is also able to perform automatic reason-

ing about the classiﬁcation of elements and the ap-

praisal of emotions by the characters.

Figure 1 provides a generic layout, with differ-

ent meanings that can be assigned to the visual el-

ements, depending on the type of hierarchy visual-

ized. Since multiple hierarchies can span the same

portion of the sequence and that the hierarchies op-

erate concurrently, the visualization will address sin-

gle dominance relationships, that can be represented

interspersed. So, NT B dominates NT B1 followed

by NT B2; NT B1, in turn, dominates t2, t3 and t4,

(a)

(b)

(c)

Figure 1: What to visualize: (a) sequence of elements;

(b) hierarchy spanning a sequence (c) multiple hierarchies

spanning a sequence.

in this order; NT B2 dominates t6, t8, t9, in this or-

der. NT A dominates NT A1 (which dominates t1,

e1, and t4, in this order) and NT A2 (which domi-

nates t5, t6, e2, and t0, in this order). Notice that e1

and e2 are extra elements predicted by the NT A1 and

NT A2, respectively), that are not present in the orig-

inal sequence. For example, states of the plans are

projected onto the sequence. t7 is a sequence element

with no hierarchy item that spans it (so, it is grey in

the visual design). t0, predicted by NT A2, does not

occur in the sequence, but, differently from the extra

elements should be present on its own; the lack of this

sequence element causes the NT A2 hierarchy item to

be not completely derived, and this is propagated onto

A too. For example, this happens with a subplan

failing or an action missing, which causes the failure

of all the ancestor plans.

The visualization algorithmic schema proceeds

bottom–up from the sequence up to the high levels

of the hierarchies: after the extraction of the prece-

dence (sequence) and dominance (hierarchy) relations

from the data sets, we compute the original sequence

positions on a line; this horizontal line accounts for

the elements of the sequence. Then, we extract the

spanning relations of hierarchy nodes onto sequence

elements and, for the leaves, the exact matches; for

each match, we compute the possible augmentations

of the sequence with null elements (that are predicted

TheVisualizationofDramaHierarchies

167

in the hierarchy but are not present in the sequence,

for various reasons, see above). Finally, we compute

the positions of the elements in the hierarchies, real-

izing the correct alignments, given span and matches,

and assign a different color to items in the hierarchy,

given some distinctive role in visualization. The ele-

ments of the hierarchies are inserted onto horizontal

layers that are superimposed one on top of another.

The characters’ intentions motivate the incidents

occurring in the sequence. These are represented by

hierarchical plans arranged on trees; plans that com-

mit to short–term goals are components (i.e., children

in tree terminology) of plans that commit to longer–

term goals. The visualization of the characters’ inten-

tions in a drama is of great importance for scholars

and professionals, and is one of the most important

differences between drama analysis and literary crit-

icism. The visualization module addresses the rep-

resentation of multiple trees of characters’ intentions

(or plans). Figure 2 shows the visualization of the

nunnery scene of Hamlet. In this case, the colors

identify the character who intend the plans visualized

in the schema. As we can see, though four agents

are involved in the nunnery scene (Hamlet, Ophelia,

Polonius, Claudius), only Hamlet and Ophelia intend

plans, that is are engines of the drama.

The timeline of incidents, at the top of the ﬁgure,

consists of actual incidents (in green), states projected

from plans (in red), null incidents (in grey, green text)

null states (in grey, white text). The latter two are pro-

jected from plans that failed (see the barred rectangles

below in the ﬁgure).

Each plan is visualized as a horizontal rectan-

gle, with actions, subplans and (precondition or ef-

fect) states as daughters; each subplan is aligned with

the plan rewrites it, until the basic actions and states

aligned with subelements in the sequence. Domi-

nance relations are represented by different layers.

Plans closer to the sequence consist of an action bor-

dered by precondition and effect states, respectively;

plans higher in the hierarchy consists of a sequence

of subplans bordered again by precondition and ef-

fect states. All actions and states are mapped onto the

timeline (dotted lines in the ﬁgure). Each incident or

state is represented by a vertical box; boxes ﬁlled with

white color and barred diagonally indicates elements

that have not been realized in the timeline, thus the

plan failed.

These representations have been designed of large

sizes for printing and contain large text for visualiza-

tion in most cases. Some space can be optimized to

visualize some more global features of the drama.

5 EFFECTIVENESS OF THE

VISUALIZATION

Now we address the use of the visualization in an ex-

perience of teaching drama to students. In the last

decades, the focus of drama courses has switched

from literary to structural and actional qualities. This

means that the text is more and more intended both

as an incident design (either on stage or on screen)

and as a network of relations over characters’ inten-

tions. For example, McKee (McKee, 1997) guides the

author through the scene splitting into beats accord-

ing to the characters’ goals and value changes. This

leads to a larger use of visualization systems to clearly

stress the structural elements in the dramatic text, and

to map the connection with the performance, i.e., to

show the continuity between event design and event

performance.

Our visualization helps the class to understand

how the text of the dramatic medium is bound to

the character’s deliberation, and thus how to read the

characters’ behaviors. While characters’ behavior

has driven some visualizations in terms of tracking the

existence (the lifespan) of the agent within the ﬂow

of the story (e.g. (Tanahashi and Ma, 2012) and (Liu

et al., 2013)), in our visualization this existence is for-

mally described as a cognitive process (i.e. plans) and

is therefore rooted on a formal approach to the spe-

ciﬁc elements of the drama. For example, the more

successful the mappings, the more the narrative text

of the dramatic medium is bound to characters’ delib-

eration (i.e. the performance is consistent with the

play). Nevertheless, a character’s plan can also be

used to trace the story ﬂow of the single character in

the plot. In fact, if we collapse all the plans and sub-

plans of a single character on one line, we can map

her/his evolution within the drama and his interlink

with the others, in terms that are consistent with (Liu

et al., 2013).

The visualization illustrated so far has proven ef-

fective in visualizing three phenomena that are fre-

quently addressed by drama scholars in research and

teaching.

In drama, it is important that the character’s plans

show some consistency with the incidents that occur

in the sequence of events. This is the fundamental

feature that gives to the audience the perception of

a logical sequencing of action, thus helps to create

the believability of the story in terms of consistent

list of incidents within the units. In our visualiza-

tion, the timeline is grounded on the perceived be-

haviors of the agents involved. In other words, it

is graphically clear that all the states (red) and ac-

tions (green) in the timeline are connected with the

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168

Figure 2: Screenshot of the visualization - excerpt of Hamlet “nunnery” scene.

elements on the character’s plan; i.e. the list of in-

cidents in the plot are grounded onto some delibera-

tive processes. The visualization attribute at Ophelia

the higher level of plans, thus showing that she holds

the overarching goal in the scene. Opposite, Ham-

let hold a lower level of plans thus showing that he

is mainly reactive to a situation designed by others.

Characters’ deliberations are complex processes and

vary according the drama. In our visualization, the

“nunnery” scene shows clearly that the timeline con-

tains a relevant number of states compared to actions;

in fact, the scene is described mainly by the precon-

ditions and effects of character’s plans rather then by

the actions performed. Thus the scene can be consid-

ered charged with a high level of psychology because,

in this case, the meaning of the actions resided mainly

into the cognitive state of the characters, and therefore

on the meaning that the audience can attribute to them

(the process known as interpretation). More states are

need to describe a drama, more the drama is based on

the psychology of the characters rather that on their

actions.

Normally the units listed in the timeline (in the

timeline’s area below the black stripe marked as

“timeline”) are the results of the synchronous occur-

rence of two agents’ plans (such as the ones by Ham-

let and Ophelia in the “nunnery” scene). We adopt a

visualization that shows a layer of parallel plans that

map onto the same chunk of the timeline. When the

two plans have a similar goal, they both aim at the

same effect: thus, they map the same ﬁnal state onto

the timeline, and are described as a shared plan. Our

visualization can also pile up different plans with op-

posite goals. When this occurs, very often it means

that only one plan will achieve its goal and thus only

one state is mapped onto the timeline. In Figure 2, we

see that plans (in the plan’s area below the black stripe

marked as “plan”) of the two characters (marked with

a color code on the top left) span the same chunk

of timeline. Some of the states planned as effects

(right side of the plans) are achieved, thus are mapped

onto the timeline: this is graphically shown as two

equivalent boxes in the plans area and onto timeline

(the corresponding state holds). Others states are not

achieved, thus are not mapped: this is graphically

shown as barred box in the plan area and a “null” box

onto the timeline (state does not hold). When the vi-

sualization shows this pattern, it means that there is

a conﬂict between the characters. Hence the visual-

ization provides a clear image of the orchestration of

conﬂicts and their execution.

In drama, character’s plan failure is normally eval-

uated through an emotional appraisal and is the rea-

son for the character’s re–deliberation. For example,

in the “nunnery” scene, the failure of the Hamlet’s

plan is a clear indication of the emotional characters’

change. This is normally one of the key ﬁgures into

the emotional engagement of the audience. The se-

quence of plans in Figure 2 represents the character

changes as a sequence of characters’ planning and

re–planning, thus stress the emotional charge of the

drama. This is particular evident in the case of Ophe-

lia: as we have seen, she has the higher level of plans

but this is composed by two main plans (bottom of the

visualization) separated by a gap ﬁlled by a Hamlet’s

plan. This shows that Ophelia has to execute some

sort of re–planning, given the failure of the ﬁrst (bot-

tom left), so to regain the lead of the scene with an-

other overarching plan (bottom right). Moreover, all

along the scene we see that there is a large number

of failed plans (shown also as null cells into the time-

line); hence, the visualization accounts for the com-

plexity of the interchange among characters (more

failed plans equals to more complex interchange).

TheVisualizationofDramaHierarchies

169

Other signiﬁcant features should be added to the

visualization, namely the Dramatic Arc and a dy-

namic/interactive construction of the mapping. This

is left for future work.

6 CONCLUSION

We have proposed a visual design and algorithmic

schema for the visualization of drama hierarchies.

In particular, we have addressed the visualization of

multiple hierarchies spanning the incident sequence,

with multiplicity expressed through different plan hi-

erarchies that span different portions of the timeline

because of failures and replanning activity, different

characters’ hierarchies, with individual plans in con-

ﬂict that span the same portion of the timeline. Fi-

nally, we have discussed the types of phenomena that

are pointed out by the visualization system. The sys-

tem relies on an ontology of drama and builds upon

the unrestricted manual annotation provided by media

students. It was tested on the analysis and exposition

of the case of a classic drama and a relevant scene

from Hamlet.

Our approach is more analytic than existing ones

with respect to addressing the basic constituents of

a story; for example, some of the visualizations pro-

posed elsewhere could be derived from our visual-

ization as well as be embedded in other methods.

Though tested to the research and didactics of drama

structure, our system can be applied to the analysis of

other types of stories that are not drama or being ap-

plied to drama production for checking the status of

screenwriting.

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