Workshop: Storygraphia, the Constrained Tool for Interactive Digital Narratives
Join us for this workshop with Vincenzo Lombardo.
Authoring tools support the creation of interactive digital narratives (IDNs) by making the creative process easier and avoiding technical skills. Authoring tools implement some design model and, sometimes, also implement the superimposition of constraints or principles on the IDN structure.
This seminar presents the authoring tool Storygraphia, for the creation of interactive digital narratives. Storygraphia is a graph-based editor: it works with a story graph, augmented with metadata for tagging and agents. The authoring tool is oriented to the didactics of interactive storytelling. Its major novelty is the implementation of classic constraints for the story engines, namely Propp functions, logical precondition-effect statements for story units, alignment with tension value of a dramatic arc. I/O is text-based and a navigation mode allows the author to explore the graph of units and detects anomalies and cycles. It allows the export to the Twine format, to achieve a complete IDN product.
Storygraphia is employed in undergraduate and master classes on Interactive Storytelling, with students producing narratives of 20–30 units that exploit the constraints implemented by the system.
Vincenzo Lombardo PhD, born 1964, is Full Professor of Informatics, at the Department of Informatics, University of Turin, Italy (www.di.unito.it/~vincenzo). He is the President of CIRMA (Centre for Research on Multimedia and Audiovisuals - www.cirma.unito.it) and Senior Research Associate to Institute of Geosciences and Georesources of National Research Council (CNR-IGG). He is co-founder and current vice-President of the School of Media and Arts of the University of Turin.
His research concerns methodologies, models and applications of informatics and artificial intelligence, for interdisciplinary challenges, such as multimedia design and interactive storytelling, knowledge encoding and semantic tagging for several domains (e.g., earth sciences, drama, archaeology),
natural language processing and cognitive modeling. His papers are published in international journals, books, conference proceedings. He is also active as a multimedia designer and producer. He has run the Art-Science Alliance Laboratory (ASA Lab) at public company Virtual Reality & Multi Media Park, from 2004 to 2012 (see videos at vimeo.com/vrmmp and vimeo.com/vlombard). He has been a coordinator and workpackage leader of European and national projects.