Collective Narrative: Scaffolding Community Storytelling through Context-Awareness

Nina Cong, Kevin Cheng, Haoqi Zhang, Ryan Louie

Abstract: Sharing mutual experiences on the same topic is an effective way to increase members’ sense of belonging to the community, but existing approaches are insufficient in building such a narrative when a community tries to connect remotely, due to barriers in sharing and organizing content. In this paper, we present Collective Narrative (CN), a context-aware system that facilitates users in identifying share-worthy moments through in-context prompting, and automates the organization process through informed section assignment to a narrative structure. A preliminary study testing the CN iPhone app demonstrates that CN can potentially scaffold in-the-moment sharings and form narratives that are comprehensive yet diverse, thereby presenting contributions in a way that users could easily identify mutual experiences and feelings by reading the narrative.