Buzz: telling compelling stories

This paper describes a digital theater installation called Buzz. Buzz consists of virtual actors who express the collective voice generated by weblogs (blogs). These actors find compelling stories from blogs and perform them. In this paper, we explore what it means for a story to be compelling and describe a set of techniques for retrieving compelling stories. We also outline an architecture for high level direction of a performance using Adaptive Retrieval Charts (ARCs), allowing a director-level of interaction with the performance system. Our overall goal in this work is to build a model of human behavior on a new foundation of query formation, information retrieval and filtering. Categories and Subject Descriptors J.5 [Arts and Humanities]: Arts, fine and performing; H.3.3 [Information Search and Retrieval]: Information filtering General Terms Human Factors Keywords Network Arts, Emotion, Blogs, Media Arts, Culture, World Wide Web, Software Agents, Story Generation

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2006
• Where: MM
• Authors: Sara Owsley, Kristian J. Hammond, David A. Shamma, Sanjay Sood
• Keywords: Adaptive Retrieval Charts, Compelling Stories, Installation Called Buzz, MM 2006