We are whatwe tell - Narrative Intelligence - page 115

sonal and moral values. These building blocks represent different aspects of the
self and can be arranged and put together in a playful way.
Learners can design and program these building blocks with storytelling
attributes and behaviors, thus exploiting the power of narrative (Polkinghorne
1988). Narrative is a fundamental component of identity construction envi-
ronments. It serves a descriptive function because it supports the finding of
coherence between the diverse personal experiences, thus allowing the telling
of a coherent life story (Linde 1993). It also serves a constructive function be-
cause it enables, through external dramatizations, to play out diverse aspects
of the self in “what if ” situations. Both the descriptive and constructive func-
tions of narrative are important in the process of identity construction and are
supported by identity construction environments.
SAGE: Storytelling agent generation environment
SAGE is an authoring environment for children to create their own wise story-
tellers to interact with by telling and listening to stories. Children can engage
with SAGE in two modes: 1) by choosing a wise storyteller from a library of al-
ready existing characters and sharing with him or her what is going on in their
lives. The sage storyteller “listens” and then offers a relevant tale in response,
and 2) by designing their own sages and programming the conversational in-
teraction between storyteller and potential users as well as creating the database
of inspirational stories offered by the storyteller in response to user's problems
(Bers & Cassell 1998).
The LISP-based SAGE architecture has three parts:
- Computationmodule :inchargeofparsingtheuser'sstorytoextractnouns
and verbs, expanding these keywords through WordNet, a hierarchical se-
mantic lexical reference system (Fellbaum 1998), and performing a match
between the user's personal story and an inspirational story in the database.
This module does not have any knowledge about story grammar; it only
deals with augmented keywords in order to find the story that is most like
the user's story - which deals with the same themes.
- Authoring language : serves to design the personality of the interactive
characters, the conversational flow between user and storyteller and the
database of stories offered by the system in response to the user's story. A
graphical user interface allows children to create conversational flows in a
way similar to that by which they engage in pretend role play games, by