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rative ideas were incorporated, both in the broad sense of narrative as coopera-
tive social construction (Barrett 1989) and in the narrower sense of a narrative
as a story written by an author (Bolter and Joyce 1987). Within AI itself, narra-
tive and dramatic concepts reappeared in the form of interactive fiction (Bates
1992, Murray 1998b).
Thus, during the same time period in which AI research abandoned study-
ing complex, culturally grounded phenomena such as meaning in favor of nar-
rowly defined problems with decisive, measurable results, other fields of CS
moved in the opposite direction, borrowing and adapting modes of knowl-
edge production from the humanities, design and the arts in order to tackle
the complexities of designing computational artifacts for and within cultural
contexts. And within this general move towards a humanistic/technical fusion,
narrative provides a particularly rich set of ideas for informing such work. It
is our contention that this engagement with narrative in other fields of CS has
opened up a new opportunity for employing narrative in AI.
Specifically, this work (re)establishes the following conditions within the
CS culture:
1.
Research methodologies which address rich, complex research questions
by employing iterative cycles (e.g. the cycle described in the Schank quote
above, where one builds to know what to think and thinks to know what
to build) have been revalidated.
2.
Interdisciplinary technical work drawing heavily on the humanities, design
and the arts has proven useful.
3.
Narrative has been recognized as a particularly rich constellation of ideas
for informing system design.
ThetimeisripeforAItoreengagenarrative,toexploreallthewaysin
which narrative intersects with intelligence of both the artificial and human
varieties. Among the first groups to begin this new exploration was a loose-knit
circle of interdisciplinary researchers at the MIT Media Lab (See Chapter 2).
They termed this area of work “Narrative Intelligence” (NI). Researchers in
the NI group pulled in notions of narrative from other disciplines into a new,
creative foment.
Therestofthisintroductionisstructuredasfollows.Thenextsection,
How to Read This Topic, provides short descriptions of each of the chap-
ters, organized into topic categories. The following section, Streams of Influ-
ence, describes some of the disciplines contributing to NI, and provides short
discipline-specific descriptions of how the chapters in this topic relate to each
of these disciplines. Finally, the section Lay of the Land describes the major
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