A Hero’s Journey – A Template Engine for Non-linear Storytelling

Lehrstuhl Informatik 5 offers a diploma/master thesis

A Hero’s Journey –
A Template Engine for Non-linear Storytelling

Computer support for non-linear storytelling is available only for professional story designers and producers. We focus on storytelling as a new means for everybody to share digital multimedia expressing memories experiences and collective knowledge on the Web 2.0. In recent projects, we have created storytelling editing systems and Web 2.0 based story production environments. Multimedia Inspired Storytelling (MIST) is a Java-based storytelling editor and player created to serve a simple but yet powerful storytelling paradigm, the Movement Oriented Design (MOD). MIST has also been successfully integrated with a click-and-point adventure game engine. MOD is aiming at the emotional involvement of story consumers. YouTell is a Web 2.0 story production environment mixing classical multimedia production roles like director, producer, and artist with Web 2.0 roles like expert, novice, and troll.

The task of this thesis project is to create a story template engine for certain story types on top of YouTell. A typical example for a template is Campbell Hero's Journey, a three stage story model with departure, initiation, and return. We want to research typical templates for storytelling and describe them in an appropriate XML based model. The models in the template repository shall be exposed to the users of YouTell and a service shall automatically validate stories in the system. In user trials they approach shall be compared against storytelling production without the template support.

Applicants should have interests in computer supported storytelling, XML data modeling and human computer interfaces. On the practical side, they should have experiences in databases, Web 2.0 technologies, XML, and Java.

Lehrstuhl Informatik 5 offers an inspiring working environment with high-end hardware and software. Applicants should be open-minded to cooperate with international students and research institutes.

For further information or submission of your application please contact:

Dr. Ralf Klamma
Lehrstuhl Informatik 5
klamma[at]dbis.rwth-aachen.de

Dipl.-Inform. Yiwei Cao
Lehrstuhl Informatik 5
cao[at]dbis.rwth-aachen.de