Contemporary Issues in Interactive Storytelling Authoring Systems.

Authoring tools for interactive narrative abstract underlying data models to allow authors to write creative works. Understanding how our program and interface design decisions alter the User Experience design could lead to more robust authoring experiences. We contribute a taxonomy of authoring tools with identified program and User Experience observations with discussion into their impact on the authoring experience as well as reflection on two detailed experiments. We then present our own authoring tool, Novella, and discuss how it has implemented the lessons learned from the analysis and how it approaches solving the identified challenges

Human-Computer Interaction

In this book the reader will find a collection of 31 papers presenting different facets of Human Computer Interaction, the result of research projects and experiments as well as new approaches to design user interfaces. The book is organized according to the following main topics in a sequential order: new interaction paradigms, multimodality, usability studies on several interaction mechanisms, human factors, universal design and development methodologies and tools

Performing the Self: Character Agency and Impression Management within the Narrative of Survivor: Samoa

This study used an in-depth textual analysis of the television show Survivor: Samoa to demonstrate that the unscripted characters of the program and shows like it have agency within the narrative. In addition to the 19th season of the Survivor series, the sample also included Jeff Probst\u27s (host and executive producer of the series) weekly blog for EntertainmentWeekly.com. Unlike most popular television narratives, the unscripted characters of Survivor: Samoa have the opportunity to tell their own story. This doctoral project was an in-depth analysis at how that authorial power was shared between the Producers of the show and the individual characters. The results of indicate there are three types of narrative agents that contributed to the storytelling process: the producers, the characters, and then a unique mix of the two. The result is a new perspective within the academic literature on Survivor and reality television shows like it. The self-performing characters are the product of our societal fascination with fame, self-promotion and hyperbolic impression management

Aboriginal participation in sport: Critical issues of race, culture and power.

This study is a qualitative examination of my lived experiences and the lived experiences of my immediate family in sport. Using critical race theory (CRT) as my guiding theoretical framework, this research project answers Denzin’s (2003) call to advance “a radical performative social science” that “confront[s] and transcend[s] the problems surrounding the colour line in the 21st century” (p.5). As such, the purpose of this project was to explore issues of race, culture and power within our lived sport experiences and to present these experiences in such way so as to unpack the tensions associated with being an Aboriginal person living in today’s Canadian society

Free will in a simulated reality: “How does agency panic affect the decisions of Matrix characters”?

Analysis of choices i the Matrix universe, looking for the effect agency panic has on the character's decision-making

Narrative Space and Serialized Forms: Story-Spaces for the Mass Market in Victorian Print and Contemporary Television

Despite Bakhtin\u27s notion of the chronotope and recent advancements in spatial theory by David Herman, Marie-Laure Ryan and Susan Friedman, narrative space is arguably still one of the most under-researched elements in narrative theory, taking a back seat to its corollary of narrative time and plot. This oversight can be largely attributed to the structuralist separation of text types exemplified by Genette\u27s assertions that description and narrative were distinctly different forms. Recent approaches such as David Herman\u27s rejection of such a separation in Story Logic, however, argue that spatial reference plays a crucial, not optional or derivative role in stories (264), and that spatial reference is, rather, a core property that helps \u27constitute\u27 narrative domains (296). In response to this gap, this dissertation examines the relationship between textual constructions of narrative space and the material forms of serialized narratives across specific medias. By looking at the intersection of the textual construction of storyworld space, the serialized form, and the materiality of media, this project argues that in both literary and televised contexts, the serialized form plays a key role in shaping the configurations of narrative space in these storyworlds and in constructing their rhetorical and ideological effects. Specifically, the project explores how the textual aspects of serial narratives affect the structure of storyworld spaces and how this affect is crucially tied to rhetorical and interpretive implications in final configurations of the narrative audience. As a result, this project makes connections between the serialized literature produced between 1830-1860 in Victorian England and that of televised narratives produced during the last decade in both Britain and the United States. Each case study is carefully historicized and examines the intersection between the materiality of the texts, their status as mediated objects, and the spatial structure of the narrative they construct

The Journey of a Digital Story: A Healing Performance of Mino-Bimaadiziwin: The Good Life

Indigenous peoples have always shared collective truths and knowledge through oral storytelling. Just as we were born, stories are born too, through our sacred “living breath.” We live in a time where stories travel far, beyond our imaginable dreams, and can have an influence on anyone who hears them. In the present-day, we have an opportunity to combine personal stories with digital technology in order to share one of our greatest gifts with each other--our experience and wisdom. For eight years, Brenda K. Manuelito and I have been traveling across Indian Country helping our Indigenous relatives create nDigiStories for Native survivance, healing, hope, and liberation. Together with our nDigiStorytellers, we are Healing Our Communities One Story at a Time®. This dissertation is a phenomenological study about the “story-sharing” of nDigiStories. It tells the story about the journey of digital stories created from an Indigenized digital storytelling process called nDigiStorytelling with an Ojibwa (Anishinaabe) community in Michigan. I explored a bricolage of methodologies from an “Indigenist” perspective, community-based participatory research, performance ethnography, and relational autoethnography. This study shows how combining an Indigenous approach to technology and media-making with deeply-held beliefs and ceremony can revitalize Indigenous people and strengthen community relationships. The electronic version of this Dissertation is available in open access at AURA, http://aura.antioch.edu/etds/ and OhioLink ETD Center, http://www.ohiolink.edu/etd. This dissertation is accompanied by a PDF document that contains links to 45 media files on the nDigiStorySharing YouTube Channel that are referenced in this documen