Envisioning Narrative Intelligence: A Creative Visual Storytelling Anthology

TL;DR

This paper explores the diverse ways humans create stories from visual sequences, identifying key themes and proposing criteria for developing narrative intelligence in automated visual storytelling systems.

Contribution

It introduces a systematic collection and thematic analysis of visual stories, outlining criteria for narrative intelligence in computational storytelling.

Findings

Identified five key themes in visual storytelling processes.

Proposed criteria for narrative intelligence: creative, reliable, expressive, grounded, responsible.

Discussed implications for training data and bias considerations.

Abstract

In this paper, we collect an anthology of 100 visual stories from authors who participated in our systematic creative process of improvised story-building based on image sequences. Following close reading and thematic analysis of our anthology, we present five themes that characterize the variations found in this creative visual storytelling process: (1) Narrating What is in Vision vs. Envisioning; (2) Dynamically Characterizing Entities/Objects; (3) Sensing Experiential Information About the Scenery; (4) Modulating the Mood; (5) Encoding Narrative Biases. In understanding the varied ways that people derive stories from images, we offer considerations for collecting story-driven training data to inform automatic story generation. In correspondence with each theme, we envision narrative intelligence criteria for computational visual storytelling as: creative, reliable, expressive, grounded, and responsible. From these criteria, we discuss how to foreground creative expression, account for biases, and operate in the bounds of visual storyworlds.