The Data of Storytelling

I’ve given a few talks recently on the topic of computational narrative understanding so I thought I would share my slides. As I detail in the slides, we have been focusing on the following areas of research towards understanding narratives:

• Narrative elements (this can be character detection, event detection, setting detection, etc)
• Narrative theory (combining narratology with NLP)
• Infrastructure (building better datasets for narrative analysis)
• Narrative detection (identifying local units of text where narration is happening)
• Narrative shape (time-based narrative phenomena such as non-linearity)
• Multi-modality (text/image interactions or oral storytelling)
• Fictionality (How does fictional narrative distinguish itself as a type of narration)
• Collective narratives (how do we move from a large set of documents to the “type” of story that is being told?)