Computational Narrative Systems
The objective of this research is to combine methods from narrative theory, computational creativity, and computer science to explore and develop model computational narrative systems.
Main content
Computers can model narrative and storytelling, the way we represent events and connect them to one another, and to our thinking, and make sense of the world.
The Computational Narrative Systems research node focuses on how computers model narrative. The node works with story generators from the past sixty years. Reimplementing working versions of these enables new types of research and teaching. The process of developing a new version, and focusing on the system’s most important aspects, is also a way of thinking about these systems and better understanding their historical importance.
The work within this node includes developing computational narrative systems—formal models of narrative, some generative, some not. These can be used for many types of inquiry. For instance, modeling both different narratives and different cultural frameworks could help us discern why some stories are understood as meaningful in particular cultural contexts—while the same stories are perplexing to people in other cultures. In the same way, we can compare the way in which different systems represent the process of generating a narrative and thus better understand this process.
