Instytut Filologii Angielskiej UJ zaprasza na wykład/prezentację prof. Teresy Dobson (University of British Columbia) i prof. Stana Rueckera (Illinois Institute of Technology) p.t. "'Open the Door and Walk In': Extending Approaches to Modeling Narrative Texts", który odbędzie się 13. marca (wtorek) o godzinie 11:45 w sali 2.119, ul. Łojasiewicza 4 (budynek Wydziału Zarządzania i Komunikacji Społecznej UJ).

"Open the Door and Walk In": Extending Approaches to Modeling Narrative Texts

Teresa M. Dobson (University of British Columbia), Stan Ruecker (Illinois Institute of Technology), Piotr Michura (Academy of Fine Arts), Omar Rodriguez (University of Alberta), and Monica Brown (University of British Columbia)

An early and ongoing approach to understanding story structure has entailed "graphing" plot. In the mid-eighteenth century, for example, Laurence Sterne included in his lengthy nine-volume fiction, Tristram Shandy, a series of five graphs of individual volumes of the text. Each graph consists of a single line with dips and swirls representing, according to Sterne, the vagaries of events in the lives of the characters (Sterne, 1986). Time progresses along the x axis from left to right, and there is no value attributed to the y axis. In the mid-nineteenth century, Gustav Freytag employed a similar approach in mapping his understanding of plot structure in Greek and Shakespearean tragedy (Freytag, 1983). In Freytag's graphing, time again progresses along the x axis from left to right; however, the value attributed to the y axis is in this case the disposition of the action: whether it is "rising" or "falling" (that is, whether it is situated before or after the climax). Known as "Freytag's Pyramid," this mapping has been widely employed for several decades in teaching plot structure in grade school, where students are invited to apply it to a range of literary types, from short stories to novels.

In this paper we will review these and other approaches to the graphing of plot, will consider the limitations of conventional models, and will describe an alternative approach: a prototypical computer-based environment for modeling narrative built using the Unity game engine. "PlotVis" is a 3D visualization system that allows researchers to load an XML-encoded story, select elements of interest, then manipulate the resulting display by yawing, rotating, zooming, panning, and so on. Researchers may choose from one of five designs currently available. Each of the models emphasizes a different approach to plot: centrality in a Fibonacci display, characters and story points in a sequential display, an architectural metaphor for structure, a wall-like design emphasizing the direction of the story, and a series of parallel and intersecting lines demonstrating relations between key elements in the narrative.

A screenshot of the Fibonacci sequence design, where tagged segments of text are represented as coloured cylinders that together form a Fibonacci-based disk. The colours correspond to the taxonomy of tags, and the height of the cylinders represents the amount of text contained in a tag.

The presentation will include a demonstration of the system working with Hemingway's short story "Hills Like White Elephants", which has been tagged in XML using our custom schema that allows us to mark five key components of stories: action, dialogue, narration, characters, and objects (Brown et al. 2011). .