skip to main content
US FlagAn official website of the United States government
dot gov icon
Official websites use .gov
A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.
https lock icon
Secure .gov websites use HTTPS
A lock ( lock ) or https:// means you've safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.

Explore Research Products in the PAR
It may take a few hours for recently added research products to appear in PAR search results.


Title: Interactive Cartographic Storytelling with Complex Spatio-Temporal Structures and Social Connections
In this paper, we describe the design of an interactive cartographic storytelling platform for the 1906 Atlanta Race Massacre, a horrific incident that had a profound impact on the civil and human rights movement in the United States. This four-day event happened at various locations in downtown Atlanta and involved many people. Although multiple books and articles have been written about the 1906 Atlanta Race Massacre, they described the past events using conventional storytelling methods. We want to tell this story from a cartographic perspective because the locations are essential to this story. We also want to connect the past with the present because most people walking on the same streets today do not know the history and significance of the locations. Furthermore, most people are unaware that some major institutions are intricately connected to the people involved in the 1906 events. Telling the story this way requires us to handle a complex spatio-temporal structure and an extensive social network, which is unusual in traditional cartographic storytelling. In this paper, we discuss our design decisions and rationals. We believe our discussion will benefit other interactive story designers who deal with similar complex stories.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
1852516
PAR ID:
10423947
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ; ;
Date Published:
Journal Name:
International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling, Lecture Notes in Computer Science
Volume:
13762
Page Range / eLocation ID:
68-82
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
More Like this
  1. ; (, Proceedings of the 2022 IEEE Conference on Games)
    Psychological research has demonstrated that as we experience a story several features affect the salience of its events in memory. These features correspond to who? where? when? how? and why? questions about those events. Computational models of salience have been used in interactive narratives to measure which events people most easily remember from the past and which they expect more readily from the future. We use three example domains to show that events in sequences that are solutions to narrative planning problems are generally more salient with each other, and events in non-solution sequences are less salient with each other. This means that measuring the salience of a sequence of actions during planning can serve as an efficient cost function to improve the speed, and perhaps also the quality, of a narrative planner. 
    more » « less
  2. ; (, Proceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems)
    null (Ed.)
    Auditory description display is verbalized text typically used to describe live, recorded, or graphical displays to support access for people who are blind or visually impaired. Significant prior research has resulted in guidelines for auditory description for non-interactive or minimally interactive contexts. A lack of auditory description for complex interactive environments remains a tremendous barrier to access for people with visual impairments. In this work, we present a systematic design framework for designing auditory description within complex interactive environments. We illustrate how modular descriptions aligned with this framework can result in an interactive storytelling experience constructed through user interactions. This framework has been used in a set of published and widely used interactive science simulations, and in its generalized form could be applied to a variety of contexts. 
    more » « less
  3. ; ; (, Communications in computer and information science)
    This paper explores avatar identification in creative story- telling applications where users create their own story and environment. We present a study that investigated the effects of avatar facial similarity to the user on the quality of the story product they create. The children told a story using a digital puppet-based storytelling system by inter- acting with a physical puppet box that was augmented with a real-time video feed of the puppet enactment. We used a facial morphing technique to manipulate avatar facial similarity to the user. The resulting morphed image was applied to each participants puppet character, thus creating a custom avatar for each child to use in story creation. We hypothesized that the more familiar avatars appeared to participants, the stronger the sense of character identification would be, resulting in higher story quality. The proposed rationale is that visual familiarity may lead participants to draw richer story details from their past real-life experiences. Qualitative analysis of the stories supported our hypothesis. Our results contribute to avatar design in children's creative storytelling applications. 
    more » « less
  4. ; ; ; ; ; (, Interactive Storytelling (Lecture Notes in Computer Science))
    Effective storytelling relies on engagement and interaction. This work develops an automated software platform for telling stories to children and investigates the impact of two design choices on children’s engagement and willingness to interact with the system: story distribution and the use of complex gesture. A storyteller condition compares stories told in a third person, narrator voice with those distributed between a narrator and first-person story characters. Basic gestures are used in all our storytellings, but, in a second factor, some are augmented with gestures that indicate conversational turn changes, references to other characters and prompt children to ask questions. An analysis of eye gaze indicates that children attend more to the story when a distributed storytelling model is used. Gesture prompts appear to encourage children to ask questions, something that children did, but at a relatively low rate. Interestingly, the children most frequently asked “why” questions. Gaze switching happened more quickly when the story characters began to speak than for narrator turns. These results have implications for future agent-based storytelling system research. 
    more » « less
  5. (, International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling)
    null (Ed.)
    Effective storytelling relies on engagement and interaction. This work develops an automated software platform for telling stories to children and investigates the impact of two design choices on children’s engagement and willingness to interact with the system: story distribution and the use of complex gesture. A storyteller condition compares stories told in a third person, narrator voice with those distributed between a narrator and first-person story characters. Basic gestures are used in all our storytellings, but, in a second factor, some are augmented with gestures that indicate conversational turn changes, references to other characters and prompt children to ask questions. An analysis of eye gaze indicates that children attend more to the story when a distributed storytelling model is used. Gesture prompts appear to encourage children to ask questions, something that children did, but at a relatively low rate. Interestingly, the children most frequently asked “why” questions. Gaze switching happened more quickly when the story characters began to speak than for narrator turns. These results have implications for future agent-based storytelling system research. 
    more » « less
  • Citation Formats
  • MLA
  • APA
  • Chicago
  • BibTeX
  • Save / Share this Record
  • Send to Email