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ysis postings and it has been employed in the analysis of television audiences'
newsgroup discussions of stories from a popular television show. The output
of the implemented system illustrates sociolinguistic analyses of the television
stories as they are visible in the social networks and language of the television
audiences' newsgroup postings. It is hoped that a tool like the Conversation
Map system can be used as a future “technology of the self ” with which au-
diences can critically reflect on the emergent social and semantic structures of
their online discussions.
Acknowledgments
As an undergraduate and later a research assistant at the Yale University Arti-
ficial Intelligence Lab, I gained an early appreciation for the symbolic AI ap-
proach to story understanding with the help of many of my friends and ac-
quaintances who were students and colleagues of Roger Schank and Robert
Abelson. Thanks to Larry Birnbaum who taught the first natural language pro-
cessing course I ever took and to many other friends and acquaintances from
the old days of the Yale AI Lab. I first came to the MIT Media Laboratory at the
invitation of Marc Davis and Mike Travers to present my work at the meeting
of the Narrative Intelligence (NI) Reading Group in 1991. One of the main rea-
sons I chose the Media Lab as the place to do my graduate work was the won-
derful interchange I experienced with the NI Group. With them I learned more
about narrative theory and media studies. I hope the present work reflects this
and can be seen as an interesting outgrowth that embodies some of the con-
cerns of the old Yale school, but diverges enough from that work to open up
one of many, possible, new, NI approaches to examining story understanding
with computational means. Although the MIT Media Lab NI Group no longer
meets together face-to-face, we are still alive online as a mailing list. Thanks to
Phoebe Sengers and Michael Mateas for organizing the AAAI Workshop that
gave us a face-to-face meeting including some of the MIT Media Lab NI Group
and many new faces too. Thanks also to Phoebe and Michael for discussions
and online exchanges about this paper and other NI-related subjects.
References
Anderson, Benedict (1983).
Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of
nationalism
.London:Verso.
