Narratives, Formalism, Computational Tools, and Nonlinearity

Abstract

We recapitulate four decades of computational processing of narratives. Vladimir Propp's work in the 1920s paved the way to both the structuralists' approach to the folktale and to narratives in general, and the story grammars approach to automate story-processing. In the latter domain, grammar-driven processing was overtaken by goal-driven processing, but there has been a comeback of story grammars, in combination with other devices. Propp's concern was with Russian folktales, and some story-generation programs are relevant indeed for folktale studies: such is the case of the programs TALE-SPIN and Joseph, which reportedly generated fables; MINSTREL generated Arthurian tales. Sometimes, bugs reveal more than proper functioning does, about the actual underlying model. Automated story processing, within artificial intelligence, showed important results since the late 1970s. After slowing down during the 1990s, since the turn of the century the field resurged, especially in the perspective of virtual environments and interactive narratives, also benefiting from the popularity of computer models of the emotions.