Principal Investigators: James Lester (PI, Computer Science), Hiller Spires (co-PI, Curriculum & Instruction)
Primary Participants (Computer Science): Alok Baikadi (Computer Science), Julius Goth (Computer Science), Eun Young Ha (Computer Science), Lisa Hervey (Education), Stacie McGowan (Art & Design), Jon Rowe (Computer Science), Marc Russo (Art & Design)
Principal Sponsor: National Science Foundation – CreativeIT Program (2008-2011)
Objectives: Representation is a central construct in the creative process. Exploring alternate representations can significantly increase the quality of artifacts created, and using multiple representations enables creators to broadly consider the multifaceted nature of the problem spaces they explore. Narrative offers an ideal “laboratory” for investigating multiple representations in the creative process because stories can be expressed in rich text (a static, uni-modal representation) re-represented in animated stories with accompanying narration and spoken dialogue (a dynamic, multimodal representation). The objective of the project is to design, build, and empirically evaluate an interactive creativity environment that facilitates the exploration of alternate representations in the creative process. In particular, the project will focus on the Narrative Theatre, an interactive narrative-centered creativity environment. The project has two complementary thrusts:
1. It will develop a full-scale interactive narrative-centered creativity environment, the Narrative Theatre. To promote the exploration of alternate representations, we are creating the Narrative Theatre, which will support the creative process: 1) Priming, in which users will be introduced to the setting and characters of the Theatre’s rich 3D environment and will then write an initial story; 2) Analysis, in which the Theatre’s statistical natural language understanding models will analyze both sentential structure (semantic parsing) and narrative structure (discourse parsing); 3) Interpretation, in which the textual representation is mapped to the Theatre’s 3D world and the characters that inhabit it to create an animated story accompanied by spoken narration and character dialogue; and 4) Exploration and Iterative Refinement, in which the user explores the story space by incrementally modifying, elaborating, and refining the textual representation and observing its effects on the animated stories.
2. It will provide a cognitive account of the role and effects of multiple representations on the creative process in a narrative-centered creativity environment. It is hypothesized that the multiple representations supported by the Narrative Theatre will significantly enhance creativity in measurable ways. Five hypotheses will be empirically studied. It is hypothesized that interacting with the Narrative Theatre will a) significantly enhance users’ narrative writing abilities, b) make users more likely to utilize creative processes (e.g., preparation, incubation, illumination, and verification), in order to support their narrative writing, c) demonstrate increased metacognitive awareness of their creative writing processes, d) cause users to exhibit differential gains based on their incoming scores on the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking, with users having lower scores exhibiting more dramatic effects, and e) cause users to have more positive perceptions of the creative process. The studies will reveal precisely which technologies and conditions contribute most effectively to creativity.
