A Thematic Approach to Emerging Narrative Structure

For the past month I have been working on and developing my thematic approach to narrative. This has resulted in a model of themes within stories which is the center piece of a paper called "A Thematic Approach to Emerging Narrative Structure" that I have submitted to the Web Science Workshop of this years Hypertext conference.

As I discussed before I have been investigating Tomashevskys work on thematics and how it could be approached to the construction of narratives as supposed to deconstruction.

The model details that themes can be constructed from other themes and motifs. Motif's are the atomic thematic elements that cannot be further broken down - they are often generalisations of entities that exist within a narrative and are directly denoted by the features within the contents of a narrative. We use the term 'Narrtaive-atoms' or 'Natoms' to describe the smallest atomic narrative segments that a story is built of such as a photo, or paragraph, it is from the meta data of these Natoms (tags or otherwise) that we build up a list of features for each Natom and through them denote motifs that can connote themes. The diagram below details this model.

Such a model could be used to identify the required features for a narrative to communicate a theme and as such if used to influence the story selection of a discourse in narrative generation to generate richer narratives with direction, flavour, and subtext.

The next step is to work towards evaluating the effect of a thematic appraoch and this system on narratives and narrative generation. To this end I am now working on making a simple montage system that can expose small story selections of narrative atoms and then selections that have been influenced with themes built from this model.

Early Ideas on Narrative and Thematics

I have recently come to the conclusion that it would be inetersting to pursue the idea of modeling Narrative from a thematics perspective. The idea behind this being that if we can communicate ideas through themes that are pevalent through out then this will generate more effective narratives and communicate the implied author more effectively then those that only deal with narrative at a more atomic level.

In his writings on "Thematics" Tomashevsky talks about a motif being the smallest thematic element, that motif's belong to the genre of any one narrative and that through motif's in a story Sub-Themes and Themes may be built. This is, as a computer scientist, a very attractive idea to model as clear objects have been defined within the narrative construct and we can use these own rules in building definitions of elements for a experiment in generating narratives.

These are very early prelimary thoughts but I have begun to think about how a basic schema modeling this might come together. If we make the assumption that we have a selection of narrative chunks, whether they be pictures, text, or video, and that these chunks are tagged based on their content - we could use this meta data to build themes within a generated narrative. We could say that these meta data tags are symbols that signify particular motifs, and in turn certain motif's and other thematic elements could be availble to construct certain themes. So, if we have a Fabula of available narrative chunks and wish the generate a narrative conveying certain themes, we could use this meta data to select narrative chunks with tags symbolising appropriate motifs to contruct the required themes. Each symbol would have a list of tags that relate to it, each motif a list of symbols that could signify it, and each theme or thematic element a list of motifs or other thematic elements that could construct it. These lists could perhaps even be statistically weighted to show, for example, which motif's are more effective at constructing particular themes.

There are many things still to think about with such a system, for example a discourse is not simply fabula selection, it is also presentation of the selection of the fabula. In Tomashevsky's work he refered to these as the story and the plot, the plot being the fully presented story. It would require more work and research to find a way of generating an order and medium of presentation for us to generate a plot and thus a full narrative.