From Personalization to Adaptivity: Creating Immersive Visits through Interactive Digital Storytelling at the Acropolis Museum

Storytelling has recently become a popular way to guide museum visitors, replacing traditional exhibit-centric descriptions by story-centric cohesive narrations with references to the exhibits and multimedia content. This work presents the fundamental elements of the CHESS project approach, the goal of which is to provide adaptive, personalized, interactive storytelling for museum visits. We shortly present the CHESS project and its background, we detail the proposed storytelling and user models, we describe the provided functionality and we outline the main tools and mechanisms employed. Finally, we present the preliminary results of a recent evaluation study that are informing several directions for future work

Conversational Exploratory Search via Interactive Storytelling

Conversational interfaces are likely to become more efficient, intuitive and engaging way for human-computer interaction than today's text or touch-based interfaces. Current research efforts concerning conversational interfaces focus primarily on question answering functionality, thereby neglecting support for search activities beyond targeted information lookup. Users engage in exploratory search when they are unfamiliar with the domain of their goal, unsure about the ways to achieve their goals, or unsure about their goals in the first place. Exploratory search is often supported by approaches from information visualization. However, such approaches cannot be directly translated to the setting of conversational search. In this paper we investigate the affordances of interactive storytelling as a tool to enable exploratory search within the framework of a conversational interface. Interactive storytelling provides a way to navigate a document collection in the pace and order a user prefers. In our vision, interactive storytelling is to be coupled with a dialogue-based system that provides verbal explanations and responsive design. We discuss challenges and sketch the research agenda required to put this vision into life.Comment: Accepted at ICTIR'17 Workshop on Search-Oriented Conversational AI (SCAI 2017

Stories as personal coaching philosophy

The importance of coaches developing and articulating a personal coaching philosophy which encapsulates their values and beliefs is widely recognised. Yet it is also acknowledged that many coaches resist what appears an abstract task or find it to be of limited use in their day-to-day practice. In this paper we explore the potential of an alternative approach to developing and articulating a personal coaching philosophy: storytelling. Following a discussion of the potential of stories, we present a story written by one coach which expresses her personal philosophy in a way that is firmly rooted in her coaching practice. Storytelling approaches, we suggest, can reveal the connections between abstract/general philosophy and the personal embodied experience of coaching. We reflect on the possibilities and problems of using stories as philosophy and offer some suggestions for how coaches may be supported in developing their coaching philosophy through storytelling

Reclaiming Our Subjugated Truths—Using Hip Hop as a Form of Decolonizing Public Pedagogy: The Case of Didier Awadi

This paper explores how Senegalese Hip Hop pioneer, Didier Awadi, uses Hip Hop as a form of decolonizing public pedagogy that renders the contributions of Pan-African leaders visible to Africa and the world, contributions that are often omitted and vilified by mainstream history. I argue that Awadi’s work provides a strategy for reclaiming oral literature, particularly storytelling, as a legitimate way of knowing, teaching and learning history. In his album Présidents d’Afrique, Didier Awadi uses rap and traditional African music to retell the story of our resistant past through an African frame of reference. The data is comprised of (1) a one-on-one interview with Didier Awadi and (2) one song of Présidents d’Afrique that best exemplifies how his storytelling narrates notions of African histories often erased in Eurocentric history. The data is analyzed using Ruth Reviere’s five Afrocentric research criteria: “ukweli (truth), ujamaa (community), kujitoa (commitment), uhaki (justice), and utulivu (harmony)” to determine whether Didier Awadi’s stories are grounded in African knowledge

Museum Experience Design: A Modern Storytelling Methodology

In this paper we propose a new direction for design, in the context of the theme “Next Digital Technologies in Arts and Culture”, by employing modern methods based on Interaction Design, Interactive Storytelling and Artificial Intelligence. Focusing on Cultural Heritage, we propose a new paradigm for Museum Experience Design, facilitating on the one hand traditional visual and multimedia communication and, on the other, a new type of interaction with artefacts, in the form of a Storytelling Experience. Museums are increasingly being transformed into hybrid spaces, where virtual (digital) information coexists with tangible artefacts. In this context, “Next Digital Technologies” play a new role, providing methods to increase cultural accessibility and enhance experience. Not only is the goal to convey stories hidden inside artefacts, as well as items or objects connected to them, but it is also to pave the way for the creation of new ones through an interactive museum experience that continues after the museum visit ends. Social sharing, in particular, can greatly increase the value of dissemination

Effect of heuristics on serendipity in path-based storytelling with linked data

Path-based storytelling with Linked Data on the Web provides users the ability to discover concepts in an entertaining and educational way. Given a query context, many state-of-the-art pathfinding approaches aim at telling a story that coincides with the user's expectations by investigating paths over Linked Data on the Web. By taking into account serendipity in storytelling, we aim at improving and tailoring existing approaches towards better fitting user expectations so that users are able to discover interesting knowledge without feeling unsure or even lost in the story facts. To this end, we propose to optimize the link estimation between - and the selection of facts in a story by increasing the consistency and relevancy of links between facts through additional domain delineation and refinement steps. In order to address multiple aspects of serendipity, we propose and investigate combinations of weights and heuristics in paths forming the essential building blocks for each story. Our experimental findings with stories based on DBpedia indicate the improvements when applying the optimized algorithm

Stories matter

Concordia University’s Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling (COHDS), http://storytelling.concordia.ca, is currently developing new oral history database software, entitled Stories Matter. As Michael Frisch notes, “[the] Deep Dark Secret of oral history is that nobody spends much time listening to or watching recorded and collected interview documents.”Instead, oral historians tend to privilege transcripts over voices, losing the meanings inherent in their interviews. By returning the orality to oral history, Stories Matter will make it possible for oral historians to engage with their interviews and their collections in a more holistic way

Personal storytelling in mental health recovery

Purpose: Creating more positive individual narratives around illness and identity is at the heart of the mental health care recovery movement. Some recovery services explicitly use personal storytelling as an intervention. This paper looks at individual experiences of a personal storytelling intervention, a recovery college Telling My Story course. Design/methodology/approach: Eight participants who had attended the Telling My Story course offered at a UK recovery college were interviewed. Data were analysed using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis. Findings: Five key themes emerged: a highly emotional experience, feeling safe to disclose, renewed sense of self, two-way process and a novel opportunity. Originality/value: The findings suggest that storytelling can be a highly meaningful experience and an important part of the individual’s recovery journey. They also begin to identify elements of the storytelling process which might aid recovery, and point to pragmatic setting conditions for storytelling interventions to be helpful. More time could be dedicated to individuals telling their story within UK mental health services, and we can use this insight into the experience of personal storytelling to guide any future developments

Publicidade digital, storytelling e transmedia narrativa: educomunicação do consumidor

The present text tries to analyze the relationships between the concept of digital storytelling applied to advertising starting from the base of the transmedia narrative. This is: how the new transmediatic narrative helps the construction of advertising discourses based on the notion of storytelling and how it establishes the bases for an educommunication of the consumer, the spectator and / or the target.El presente texto trata de analizar las relaciones entre el concepto de storytelling digital aplicado a la publicidad partiendo de la base de la narrativa transmedia. Esto es: cómo la nueva narrativa transmediática ayuda a la construcción de discursos publicitarios basados en la noción de storytelling y cómo ello establece las bases para una educomunicación del consumidor, del espectador y/o del target.O presente texto tenta analisar as relações entre o conceito de narrativa digital aplicado à publicidade a partir da base da narrativa transmedia. Isto é: como a nova narrativa transmediaica ajuda a construção de discursos publicitários com base na noção de narrativa e como estabelece as bases para uma educação do consumidor, o espectador e / ou o target