Generating Narrative Spaces from Events History

For a successful distributed teamwork it is vital to provide team-members with awareness on collaborative activities. One way of achieving this is through applying a narrative based approach to construct the events that have taken place on documents and folders in a project workspace, as various members make changes to its content. The research presented in this paper investigates the possibility of exploring the history of activities performed by team members. Past events are aggregated in the form of a three dimensional environment time tunnel, providing the team-members with a generative tool to visualize the project?s events history in various configurations, in order to reveal the usually hidden relationships between separate pieces of events. Furthermore we provide a tool for managing and inspecting the folder?s contents: the DocuDrama Timetunnel. Here we present preliminary findings showing how the visualisation of a sequence of connected actions and happenings using a temporal and spatial narrative based approach may lead to a better understanding of the project-related events history

Symbolic Activities in Virtual Spaces

This paper presents an approach to combine concepts ofsymbolic acting and virtual storytelling with the support ofcooperative processes. We will motivate why symboliclanguages are relevant in the social context of awarenessapplications. We will describe different symbolicpresentations and illustrate their application in three differentprototypes

DocuDrama

This paper presents an approach combining concepts of virtual storytelling with cooperative processes. We will describe why storytelling is relevant in cooperation support applications. We will outline how storytelling concepts provide a new quality for groupware applications. Different prototypes illustrate a combination of a groupware application with various storytelling components in a Theatre of Work

The 'Dark Continent' goes north: an exploration of intercultural theatre practice through Handspring and Sogolon Puppet Companies' production of Tall Horse

This essay explores the complexities of intercultural interaction, specifically in the context of globalization. These interactions involve not only contact with, but also negotiation of cultural representations. The debates about the processes involved in such encounters are complex and highlight tensions among aesthetics, ideology, the ethics of production, voice, and authorship. The essay begins by outlining some of the key debates and issues specifically for theatre; in particular, it looks at the tension between Brook’s transcultural approach to intercultural theatre and Rustom Bharucha’s insistence on contextualized and historicized interactions. These theoretical positions are explored against the specific example of Tall Horse (2005), an intercultural production by the South African Handspring Puppet Company, the Malian Sogolon Puppet Company, a choreographer from Benin, and a scriptwriter from New York. The essay examines both the ideological issues raised in the text and the practical issues of cross-cultural collaboration and interaction to suggest an approach that may mediate between binaries that seem to dominate cultural interaction

An evaluation of approaches to commissioning young people’s services

"This small-scale survey examines approaches to the commissioning of services for young people in 12 local authority areas and reports on the experience of national organisations involved in this work" - front cover