Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
In “Web guide agents: Narrative context with character,” Isbister and Doyle
describe agents that can use special annotations on web sites to gain access to
narrative structure of information and to be able to relay this to human users.
Support for human storytelling
Since stories are an important part of human life, several researchers have be-
gun building systems that support people in telling stories to one another.
Some of these systems, such as Kimiko Ryokai's Storymat (Ryokai & Cassell
1999), record and play back stories that people have told. Others, like Marina
Umaschi Bers's SAGE Storytellers (Umaschi 1997) and Kevin Brooks' Agent
Stories (Brooks 1997), allow people to create their own interactive storytellers
and stories.
In “Assumptions underlying the Erasmatron storytelling system,” Craw-
ford describes how the Erasmatron is specifically designed to ease the burden
for the non-programmer of interactive story design.
In “Agneta & Frida: Merging web and narrative?,” Persson, Höök, and
Sjölinder aim to support human narrative understanding of the normally non-
narrative Web.
In “Stories of lemurs and robots: The social origin of storytelling,” Daut-
enhahn describes a robotic system for helping autistic children to be able to
understand human behavior, providing them with training for narrative in-
telligence.
In “We are what we tell: Designing narrative environments for children,”
Bers describes several virtual environments based on constructionist learning
principles which can be used by children to explore and develop their iden-
tities and values in a community, using narrative as an essential element for
developing a coherent sense of self.
Story database systems
Some researchers have found it useful to design systems which allow humans
to access databases of stories. Presenting information in the form of narratives,
they argue, makes it easier and more pleasant for people to process the infor-
mation. Schank (Schank 1997) has built a training system, Ask Tom, on this
principle. It contains a database of stories describing how people have handled
commonly occurring problem situations; these stories are triggered by the sys-
tem when the trainee faces a similar situation. Another example of this kind
of work is IBM Research's project on Knowledge Socialization, which looks at
