Project

Storied Navigation

Today, people can tell stories by composing, manipulating, and sequencing individual media artifacts using digital technologies. However, these tools offer little help in developing a story's plot. Specifically, when a user tries to construct her story based on a collection of individual media elements (videos, audio samples), current technological tools do not provide helpful information about the possible narratives that these pieces can form. Storied Navigation is a novel approach to this problem; media sequences are tagged with free-text annotations and stored as a collection. To tell a story, the user inputs a free-text sentence and the system suggests possible segments for a storied succession. This process iterates progressively, helping the user to explore the domain of possible stories. The system achieves the association between the input and the segments' annotations using reasoning techniques that exploit the WordNet semantic network and common-sense reasoning technology.