ActorVis: A Visual Analytics Approach for Script Exploration and Performance Guidance

Understanding and interpreting a script is essential for effective acting. Existing visualization methods, however, primarily focus on general narrative comprehension and often neglect actors' specific cognitive and expressive needs. To address this gap, we propose an actor-oriented visual analytics approach that automatically extracts key script features, including implicit emotions, causal relationships, and critical events, to support rapid comprehension of coherent storylines. These extracted features are integrated into a coordinated multi-view visualization, enabling actors to analyze and explore scripts comprehensively and gain deeper insights into the narrative. Furthermore, we introduce a method for structuring performance guidance, converting script events into interpretable, multi-stage recommendations that adapt to individual acting styles. Actor feedback is incorporated to iteratively refine these recommendations, ensuring alignment with personal performance traits. To demonstrate the practicality of our approach, we implement ActorVis, a system that operationalizes these methods and provides actors with interactive visualizations and adaptive performance guidance. Case studies and user evaluations confirm the approach's effectiveness in facilitating rapid script understanding and enhancing personalized performance support.