Towards a Computational Narration of Inner World.
Jichen Zhu · DH · 2010
Narrative, as it evolves with technological developments, constantly reinvents itself in order to better capture new social orders and individual experiences. As an emerging cultural expression, however, most computer-‐generated narrative works are still restricted to an action-‐based, goal-‐driven aesthetics, leaving little space for characters’ inner world. This paper proposes to expand the range of computer-‐ generated narrative by addressing this imbalance between the “physical” and the “internal.” It presents our approach for algorithmically narrating characters’ inner world by leveraging the synergy between modernist stream of consciousness literature and contemporary research in artificial intelligence and cognitive science. The Riu system, a text-‐based computational narrative system inspired by Woolf’s novel Mrs. Dalloway, is provided as a case study towards this new direction. I. Computer-Generated Narrative Contemporary forms of narrative have evolved rapidly as digital technologies continue to be integrated in modern society. New conventions at the levels of both content and discourse have been established to reflect the constantly changing relationship between human and technology. For instance, popular science fictions of the 1980s (e.g., The Terminator) embodied the prevailing cyborg discourse and confusions of human identity within the Cold War context (Edwards, 1996). Similarly, hypertext fictions in the 1990s instantiated the postmodernist mentality of its time by turning everything – writer, reader, and society – into fragments (Johnson-‐Eilola, 1997). In this regard, the emerging form of computer-generated