Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license
We propose a modified Entity Relationship (E-R) model, traditionally used for software engineering, to structure, store and share plot data. The flexibility of E-R modelling has been demonstrated by its decades of usage in a wide variety of situations. The success of the E-R model suggests that it could be useful for collaborating fiction authors, adding a certain degree of computational power to their process. We changed the E-R model syntax to better suit the story plans, switching the emphasis from generic types to instanced story entities, but preserving relationships and attributes. We conducted a small-scale basic experiment to study the impact of using our modified E-R model on authors when understanding and contributing into a pre-existing fiction story plan. The results analysis revealed that the E-R model supports authors as effectively as written text in reading comprehension, memory, and contributing. In addition, the results show that, when combined together, the written text and the E-R model help participants achieve better comprehension--always within the frame of our experiment. We discuss potential applications of these findings.
@InProceedings{tapscott_et_al:OASIcs.CMN.2014.209,
author = {Tapscott, Alan and Col\`{a}s, Joaquim and Moghnieh, Ayman and Blat, Josep},
title = {{Modifying Entity Relationship Models for Collaborative Fiction Planning and its Impact on Potential Authors}},
booktitle = {2014 Workshop on Computational Models of Narrative},
pages = {209--221},
series = {Open Access Series in Informatics (OASIcs)},
ISBN = {978-3-939897-71-2},
ISSN = {2190-6807},
year = {2014},
volume = {41},
editor = {Finlayson, Mark A. and Meister, Jan Christoph and Bruneau, Emile G.},
publisher = {Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
address = {Dagstuhl, Germany},
URL = {https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/OASIcs.CMN.2014.209},
URN = {urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-46588},
doi = {10.4230/OASIcs.CMN.2014.209},
annote = {Keywords: storytelling, story planning, Entity Relationship Model}
}