In digital humanities (DH) and cultural heritage (CH), visualization-based storytelling (VBS) has become an important approach for structuring, interpreting, and communicating cultural data and research results. The specific characteristics of these domains – historically oriented data, high levels of semantic ambiguity and uncertainty, interpretive rather than purely analytical goals, and deep expertise in narrative theory and practice – create both distinct requirements for VBS design and distinct opportunities that existing frameworks and tools only partially address. Yet the body of work that has emerged in response to these requirements remains scattered across disciplines and venues, with no systematic account of current practice and no consolidated view of open challenges.Against this backdrop, we survey DH and CH work on story designs and VBS tools to identify trends and recurring patterns, promising practices, and open challenges. We contribute by (1) synthesizing storytelling design spaces into a framework tailored to VBS in DH and CH, (2) mapping existing approaches to generate a field-level picture of practices and gaps, and (3) highlighting future areas of concern and inquiry for VBS in relation to domain-specific epistemic questions. Overall, this survey seeks to consolidate an emerging community of practice and offer a shared analytical foundation for future research and design.

Abstract Digital methods are increasingly applied to store, structure and analyse vast amounts of musical data. In this context, visualization plays a crucial role, as it assists musicologists and non‐expert users in data analysis and in gaining new knowledge. This survey focuses on this unique link between musicology and visualization. We classify 129 related works according to the visualized data types, and we analyse which visualization techniques were applied for certain research inquiries and to fulfill specific tasks. Next to scientific references, we take commercial music software and public websites into account, that contribute novel concepts of visualizing musicological data. We encounter different aspects of uncertainty as major problems when dealing with musicological data and show how occurring inconsistencies are processed and visually communicated. Drawing from our overview in the field, we identify open challenges for research on the interface of musicology and visualization to be tackled in the future.

Joseph Priestley's Chart of Biography is a masterpiece of hand-drawn data visualization. He arranged the lifespans of around 2,000 individuals on a timeline, and the chart obtained great value for teaching purposes. We present a generic, interactive variant of the chart adopting Priestley's basic design principles. Our proposed visualization allows for dynamically defining person groups to be visually compared on different zoom levels. We designed the visualization in cooperation with musicologists having multifaceted research interests on a biographical database of musicians. On the one hand, we enable deriving new relationships between musicians in order to extend the underlying database, and on the other hand, our visualization supports analyzing time-dependent changes of musical institutions. Various usage scenarios outline the benefit of the Interactive Chart of Biography for research in musicology.