Modelling the meaning of museum stories

Demonstration
Annika Wolff, UK , Paul Mulholland, UK, Trevor Collins, UK

Published paper: Modeling the Meaning of Museum Stories

Museum professionals create narratives that tell stories about museum objects and across museum objects. Narratives are not limited to the physical exhibition, but include also catalogues, audio tours, educational materials and web sites. In this paper we will describe Storyscope, a web-based environment for the construction of museum narratives, which links a final narrative to the underlying story and plot, thus allowing end-users the ability to see the thought-processes of the curator and to develop their own personalised narratives. We focus on the reasoning processes embedded into Storyscope that support a narrative author in story building by proposing additional events, and relations between events, for developing a plot of the story. Intelligent support also draws on notions of dramatic narrative to suggest ways of narrating a story and plot eliciting different types of reader response.