Storyscope: Supporting the authoring and reading of museum stories using online data sources

Museum staff tell stories to assist visitor interpretation of artworks. Visitors also tell their own stories to articulate their understanding and opinion of artworks. Additional knowledge about the concepts mentioned or tagged in these stories can be found from online data sources. These could be used to assist reader interpretation or author development of stories. However, the potentially vast network of heterogeneous knowledge that can be created around the tags or annotations of a story could be bewildering for the story reader or author. Here we present Storyscope, a test-bed environment for the authoring, reading and semantic annotation of museum stories. The integration of online knowledge within the task of story authoring or interpretation is facilitated by mapping the available knowledge to a set of facts and simple events related to each story annotation. Narrative principles of theme and setting are used to discover and highlight aspects of the knowledge of potential value to the author or reader. Preliminary studies indicate the potential of the approach for providing a form of semantic navigation across stories and concepts having a better cognitive fit to story related tasks than existing forms of navigation.