Storyscope: Using Setting and Theme to Assist the Interpretation and Development of Museum Stories

Abstract

Stories are used to provide a context for museum objects, for example linking those objects to what they depict or the historical context in which they were created. Many explicit and implicit relationships exist between the people, places and things mentioned in a story and the museum objects with which they are associated. Storyscope is an environment for authoring museum stories comprising text, media elements and semantic annotations. A recommender component provides additional context as to how the story annotations are related directly or via other concepts not mentioned in the story. The approach involves generating a concept space for different types of story annotation such as artists and museum objects. The concept space of an annotation is predominantly made up of a set of events, forming an event space. The story context is aggregated from the concept spaces of its associated annotations. Narrative notions of setting and theme are used to reason over the concept space, identifying key concepts and time-location pairs, and their relationship to the rest of the story. The author or reader can use setting and theme to navigate the context of the story.