Empirical Insights Into Short Story Draft Construction

Existing cognitive models of narrative creation provide accounts for story invention that, while useful, are too high level to be directly applied to formal systems like computational models of narrative generation. Inversely, existing automatic story generation systems that try to implement cognitive models can only rely on approximations to the general concepts these models describe. In order to provide insight to ll the gap between these two approaches, we have conducted a study in which human participants would invent and write short stories while re ecting on their thoughts out loud. The sessions and the analysis of the recordings was designed so that we could observe which speci c modi cations the participants apply to their story drafts, with the intention to inform the process of creating computational systems based on cognitive descriptions of the narrative creation process. After running the experiments, annotating the videos and analysing the output, we have concluded that there are a number of common modi cations that humans tend to apply to a newly created draft, and that this information can be used to the development of storytelling systems

1 Folklore and New Media communications: an exploration of Journey to the West, its modern orality and traditional storytelling in contemporary online spaces

This paper is the study of Journey to the West as a medium and cultural commodity rather than merely a novel; one that has been continuously told in one form or another for over a thousand years. I examine the story diachronically, through a media ecology lens, in an effort to understand the story's traditions through temporal synchronic studies. I propose that the study of the book has largely overshadowed the true scope of the story’s cultural importance. I posit that Journey to the West is a medium that should be considered separately from the technologies and media that use it as content. I assert that its components and structural elements are deeply rooted in the Chinese oral tradition, which is reliant on the interplay of orality and literacy. I complete a content analysis of film and television texts to validate this hypothesis. I use the results to identify patterns across the texts that can be explored more deeply across historical texts in the Journey to the West canon. The aim of this analysis is to identify storytelling motifs that can be traced back to the popularised novel and its antecedents. I also look at the discourse surrounding online culture and storytelling relating to the milieu of pre-literate societies, and how modern devices may also mimic elements of storytelling experience in Journey to the West's past. The evidence points to a complex relationship between medium, technology and audience, the investigation of which, I argue, demonstrates culturally contextual episteme within the story. I finally assert that the story and the Monkey King are an environment that is immersive due to the multitude of texts and representations within Chinese culture. This I state, is why the story has such substantive cultural value; it goes almost unnoticed and therefore becomes a powerful medium to tell stories laden with messages that the storyteller wishes to make

How Distant is Close Enough? Exploring the Toponymic Distortions of Life Story Geographies

Stories are now broadly recognized as important sources of geographic information in different domains of the spatial humanities. The methodologies mobilized to identify these spatial data, however, remain the subject of intense debate. In this paper, we contribute to this debate by focusing on what we can learn from the close reading of stories to improve the quality of distant reading approaches. We do this through an in-depth comparative analysis of how toponyms are used across 10 oral life stories of exiles. Results show that a “distant listening” of the number of country names mentioned in these stories provides an accurate representation of their global geographies. However, the finer-scaled geographies of these stories become highly distorted when counting more local toponyms such as neighbourhoods, cities or regions. This study also reveals that results could be improved by accounting for the distribution and repetition of toponyms throughout these stories. Such insights and their nuances are described in this paper with an aim to help narrow the gap between close and distant reading methodologies

Story patterns in oral narratives: a variationist critique of Labov and Waletzky's model of narrative schemas

Labov and Waletzky's (1967) influential six-schema model of personal narratives has often been considered to make claims regarding a 'universal' narrative structure (Hurst, 1990; Hymes, 1996). This study tests how far variations in personal narratives at a schematic level (that is, which schemas are present and how they combine to structure the narrated experience) correlate with aspects of an individual's culture. Oral narratives produced by members of the Greek Cypriot community in London are analysed, to provide data from an alternative group of informants to Labov and Waletzky's, while still using their model as the central framework for analysis. Frequent appearance in the data of an additional schema, 'post-evaluation', suggests that culture is a variable in relation to narrative structure, as are more specific individual and social factors including age and gender. Story topic is also shown to influence how narratives are structured, with different topics resulting in different structures and the general underlying theme of "Trouble" (Burke, 1945; Bruner, 1991; Bruner, 1997) (in fight, danger of death, argument and embarrassing personal experiences) shown to guarantee the 'crisis' required in a narrative. Such findings have implications as regards claims of a universal model of narrative; and the general view that one narrative-structure model may be suitable for all personal narratives is re-examined. By way of conclusion, the study formulates a 'variationist' model of narrative 'grammar' that combines core, optional and culturally variant features. It is suggested that such a model may begin to capture how an individual's social and cultural background, as well as story topic, can function as decisive factors in determining narrative form.

The art of getting lost: reeling through Benjamin

This project asks why Walter Benjamin regarded film as a revolutionary technology. Through Picture House and Hansel & Gretel, two `digital objects' I have composed, and my text, the art of getting lost, I trace the obscure connections among memory, mimesis, embodied experience, communication, translation, forgotten futures, allegory, and the (neo)baroque, which Benjamin weaves together in his theory of film. In film's mimetic nature Benjamin saw a means to (re)educate our abilities to make connections, to stray from our usual ways of perceiving and to enter into an astonishment that can lead to new awareness. I argue that in his concept of innervation -an exchange between screen and skin- Benjamin sees film as producing a semblance of an oral society, one which privileges memory and embodied communication. Film, I posit, is a site which Benjamin understood as permitting a recuperation of the sensual; for him it is a time and place which sutured experience and representation, body and memory. Further, I argue that the aura Benjamin claimed was stripped away in technological reproduction is in film actually reproduced as an `afterlife' which is able to touch us in ways that are more than metaphorical. My own practice picks up on Benjamin's notion that within film there lies buried what paradoxically he called forgotten futures. My pieces play along one of these possible tangents, engaging in a baroque cinema of attractions which celebrates artifice and openendedness. Benjamin, I am arguing, saw the technology of film as performing a remembrance service, reminding us of the cost of uncritically accepting representations and misusing technologies. His theories prove as relevant to today, if not more so, as to the time he wrote them

Automatic Image Captioning with Style

This thesis connects two core topics in machine learning, vision and language. The problem of choice is image caption generation: automatically constructing natural language descriptions of image content. Previous research into image caption generation has focused on generating purely descriptive captions; I focus on generating visually relevant captions with a distinct linguistic style. Captions with style have the potential to ease communication and add a new layer of personalisation. First, I consider naming variations in image captions, and propose a method for predicting context-dependent names that takes into account visual and linguistic information. This method makes use of a large-scale image caption dataset, which I also use to explore naming conventions and report naming conventions for hundreds of animal classes. Next I propose the SentiCap model, which relies on recent advances in artificial neural networks to generate visually relevant image captions with positive or negative sentiment. To balance descriptiveness and sentiment, the SentiCap model dynamically switches between two recurrent neural networks, one tuned for descriptive words and one for sentiment words. As the first published model for generating captions with sentiment, SentiCap has influenced a number of subsequent works. I then investigate the sub-task of modelling styled sentences without images. The specific task chosen is sentence simplification: rewriting news article sentences to make them easier to understand. For this task I design a neural sequence-to-sequence model that can work with limited training data, using novel adaptations for word copying and sharing word embeddings. Finally, I present SemStyle, a system for generating visually relevant image captions in the style of an arbitrary text corpus. A shared term space allows a neural network for vision and content planning to communicate with a network for styled language generation. SemStyle achieves competitive results in human and automatic evaluations of descriptiveness and style. As a whole, this thesis presents two complete systems for styled caption generation that are first of their kind and demonstrate, for the first time, that automatic style transfer for image captions is achievable. Contributions also include novel ideas for object naming and sentence simplification. This thesis opens up inquiries into highly personalised image captions; large scale visually grounded concept naming; and more generally, styled text generation with content control

IndieBook

Ausgehend vom Wunsch als Leser und Leserin Geschichten mit zu gestalten, präsentiert diese Diplomarbeit das theoretische Konzept IndieBook für ein System zur Generierung fiktiver Welten für individualisierte Bücher. Die ideelle Basis von IndieBook bildet das kollaborative Einwirken von Autor, Leser und Computer in den Generationsprozess: Der einzigartige Stil des Autors bestimmt die statischen Voreinstellungen. Über interaktive Wahlmöglichkeiten und personalisierte Informationsquellen bringt sich der Leser ein. Das System fügt dies zusammen und generiert daraus Narrationen. Voraussetzung dafür ist eine grundlegende Formalisierung fiktiver Welten. Dafür wurden Modelle aus der Narratologie, Kognitionswissenschaft und Soziologie herangezogen und mit Techniken der Informatik formalisiert. Nach allgemeinen Voreinstellungen werden die Weltmodelle über die Realitätsrelationen und den daraus resultierenden Fiktivitätsgrad generiert. Die eigentlichen Bestandteile der Welt sind das Setting, die Charaktere und die Ereignisse. Das sozial-historisch-räumliche Setting konkretisiert die Relationen zu einem Rahmen für die Charaktere und Ereignisse. Die Charaktergeneration erfolgt in einem 6-stufigen Modell, das in einer detailierten, strukturierten Datenbank für jede einzelne Figur resultiert. Nach der Formalisierung der verschiedenen Formen von Ereignissen, wurde deren Narrativität und Struktur diskutiert.Based on the wish of many readers to co-create a story, this diploma thesis presents a theoretical concept called IndieBook to generate fictive worlds for individualized books. The idea behind IndieBook is the collaboration of author, reader, and computer in the generation process: The unique style of the author provides the static defaults. Then, the reader interacts through a range of possibilities and personalized information is integrated. Finally, the system merges these inputs and defaults and generates narrations. One major condition for this concept is a fundamental formalization of fictive worlds. Therefore, models were adopted from Narratology, Cognitive Science, and Sociology, modified to meet the requirement, and formalized with techniques of Computer Science. After the general presettings, the world models are generated through their relations to the reality and the resulting degree of fictivity. On this foundation, the components of the world are established: the setting, the characters, and the events. The socio-historico-spatial setting concretizes the relations and works as a referential frame for the characters and events. The generation of characters proceeds in a 6-layered model, that results in a detailed, structured data base for each protagonist. After formalizing the modes of events, the tellability and structure of events were discussed

Preaching in the \u27Hear\u27 and Now: Justification, Development, and Assessment of \u27Parabolic Engagement\u27 Pedogogy in French-Speaking Missionary Settings

This thesis argues the utility of ‘parabolic engagement’ method for preachers and listeners in the French Antillean context. The opening chapter defines key terms and clarifies how this imaged sermonic style addresses the listening habits of targeted audiences. It explains that figured delivery is often context-interpretive, involving a more personal, experiential decoding by the listener. Engagement technique increases auditor involvement and creates unique communicative rapport. The chapter points out that the entire experimental process validates the usefulness of the pedagogy. Part One addresses the theological rationale for ‘parabolic engagement’ method. Chapter Two reviews appropriate literature with respect to engagement. Chapter Three argues the biblical basis for creating a method of figured preaching. Chapter Four discusses how precise homiletic situations demand a circumstantial approach to engaging delivery. Part Two attempts to synthesize a broad range of image-creation methodologies and make them suitable for teaching among oral peoples. Chapter Five shows the necessity of a grammar for figured proclamation pedagogy. Chapter Six develops simplified classical methods for finding the illustrative crux of an idea or text. Chapter Seven shows the need to then engage the listener by means of analogous correspondence with the concrete world. Chapter Eight explores how circumstantial factors encourage the transformation of engaging analogies into extended narratives. Part Three validates the thesis within the missionary setting. Chapter Nine describes the suitability of ‘parabolic engagement’ method among Creoles and European French on the island of Martinique. Chapter Ten establishes an experimental design by specifying components, clarifying how the hypotheses were tested, justifying data collection methods, and explaining the use of participatory action research and educational ethnography. Chapter Eleven details the implementation, measurement, and success of engagement strategies. Lastly, Chapter Twelve argues for the utility of ‘parabolic engagement’ and posits generalizations by summarizing the merits, conclusions, and limitations of the model