For my Ph.D. work I developed a method of summarizing clusters of stories (narrative plans), in order to help domain authors better understand what kinds of stories are possible. To evaluate the technique, I made a tool that allows people to configure a story world and explore it by clicking on clusters and reading example stories. You can try it yourself using this link:
https://code.rac7hel.com/domain-authoring-study-demo/
At the bottom of that page (after the Intro), you can toggle between the three different versions of the tool: The Circles and Tree versions each use a different type of cluster summary, and the Control version uses no summary.
The point of this is that it’s really difficult to anticipate exactly what stories are modeled by a narrative planning domain, even if you wrote it yourself! I asked people from all three groups whether or not specific stories were possible in the world they had just configured. My summary tools helped people answer these questions more accurately.
You can try this by clicking the “Answer 14 Questions” button at the bottom, once you’ve configured the world however you want it. After you answer all the questions, it will show you what percent you got right. (This is just for demo purposes; I’m not collecting any more data.)
Feedback and questions are always welcome. Thanks for visiting!
