Narrative-Centered Computing for Childhood Environmental Awareness

这个项目旨在创建一个以叙事为中心的计算(NCC)框架，帮助儿童更有效地推理(A)调解环境变化的分布式因果链，以及(B)他们如何在这些链中进行有效干预。NCC框架从一种新的计算故事讲述机制开始，称为时空锚定。时空锚定的故事不是由线性的“电影胶片”组成的，而是由故事节点组成的网络。每个节点描绘了整个情节的一个小元素，并固定在空间和时间的特定位置。为了推进故事，用户探索相关时空地点的丰富地理表示，发现故事节点和它们之间的相互联系。由于节点可以固定在不同的时空分辨率水平上，并以非线性的方式相互联系，探索这些叙事将有助于儿童发展更细微的能力，以推理分布式因果关系和可变尺度。这些能力反过来将转化为更有效地参与环境问题。在关注教育中的特定主题的同时，该项目寻求开发一种新的信息技术方法，以全面提高人类的认知能力。我们全球环境困境的一个显著特征是问题的广泛性与人类目前反应的有限性质之间的差距。这种脱节可能反映了我们的直觉、认知和情感过程的潜在局限性。作为适应人类规模的复杂性和因果关系的有机体，我们缺乏有效的手段来推理驱动环境现象的各种时间、空间和社会分布的相互作用。这项创新的研究旨在解决这个问题，并克服我们在推理分布式数据方面的困难，转而关注我们连接故事的实质性能力。NCC框架还包括新颖的交互机制，用户可以通过这些机制通过现实世界中的目标行为来影响故事世界中展开的事件。这些机制将允许儿童看到他们自己的环境相关行为模式，在直觉上可以理解的因果映射的中介下，如何在故事生态系统中引起积极或消极的变化。用户的行为和展开的故事之间的这种反馈将对儿童发展环境责任感产生强大的影响。驱动这些互动机制的数据也将为评估这项研究的有效性提供一种自然的手段。作为测试和完善NCC框架的一种方式，这项研究将包括创建一个试验床互动叙事，将在网上部署，并作为临时科学博物馆展览。这一叙事将使用时空锚定以及视频和传统电影技术来戏剧化地描述加州具有代表性的生态系统内发生的相互作用，例如，海洋环境中海獭、海藻森林和海胆都在其中互动。这一叙述的行为影响和教育效果将通过上述数据收集机制以及与用户的访谈进行评估。这项研究将通过开发一种新的方法来将复杂的分布式现象嵌入到交互式叙事格式中，从而为以人为中心的计算做出重大贡献。这里开发的时空锚定技术不仅在当前环境系统的上下文中是有用的，而且在各种其他领域中也是有用的，例如正式教学(例如，用于理解其他STEM主题的交互叙述)、社交网络、游戏(例如，其中玩家创建故事节点以驱动情节的大规模多玩家世界)和个人信息架构(例如，地理上锚定的个人生活史设备)。通过将儿童作为目标受众，这项研究也将对以儿童为中心的新兴计算领域做出实质性贡献。特别是，这项工作将为进一步研究如何使用故事和叙事来创建即使是非常年幼的儿童也能随时使用的计算系统奠定基础。该系统的环境主题也将符合国家和加利福尼亚州的科学教育指导方针，从而使其有可能在正式课堂环境以及家庭和科学博物馆等非正式学习环境中广泛部署。

This project seeks to create a framework for narrative-centered computing (NCC) that will help children reason more effectively about (a) the distributed chains of causation that mediate environmental change, and (b) how they can intervene effectively within those chains. The NCC framework begins with a new mechanism for computational storytelling called spatiotemporal anchoring. Spatiotemporally anchored stories consist not of a linear "filmstrip," but instead of a network of story nodes. Each node depicts a small element of the overall plot, and is anchored to a specific location in space and time. To advance the story, users explore a rich geographical representation of the relevant spatiotemporal locale, discovering story nodes and the interconnections between them. Because nodes can be anchored at variable levels of spatiotemporal resolution and interlinked in non-linear ways, exploring these narratives will help children to develop more nuanced abilities for reasoning about distributed causation and variable scale. These abilities, in turn, will translate into more effective engagement with environmental issues. While focusing on a particular topic in education, this project seeks to develop a new information technology method for enhancing human cognitive abilities in general. A striking feature of our global environmental predicament is the disparity between the breadth of the problem and the limited nature of humanity's current response. This disconnection may reflect underlying limitations on our intuitive cognitive and emotional processes. As organisms that are adapted to "humansized" scales of complexity and causation, we lack effective means for reasoning about the kinds of temporally, spatially, and socially distributed interactions that drive environmental phenomena. This innovative research seeks to address this problem and to overcome our difficulties in reasoning about distributed data by focusing instead upon our substantial ability to connect to stories.The NCC framework also includes novel interaction mechanisms through which users can influence unfolding events in a story world via targeted behaviors in the real world. These mechanisms will allow children to see how their own environmentally relevant patterns of behavior, mediated by intuitively understandable causal mappings, could cause positive or negative changes in a story ecosystem. This feedback between user's actions and the unfolding story will have powerful implications for children's developing sense of environmental responsibility. The data that drives these interaction mechanisms will also provide a natural means of evaluating the effectiveness of this research. As a way of testing and refining the NCC framework, the research will include the creation of a testbed interactive narrative, to be deployed online and as a temporary science museum exhibit. This narrative will use spatiotemporal anchoring along with video and traditional cinematographic techniques to dramatize the interactions that take place within a representative California ecosystem, for example, a marine environment in which sea otters, kelp forests, and sea urchins all interact. The behavioral impact and educational effectiveness of this narrative will be evaluated both via the aforementioned data collection mechanisms as well as through interviews with users. This research will make a significant contribution to Human-Centered Computing by developing a novel approach to embedding complex distributed phenomena in an interactive narrative format. The spatiotemporal anchoring technique developed here will be useful not just in the context of the present environmental system, but in a variety of other domains such as formal pedagogy (e.g., interactive narratives for understanding other STEM topics), social networking, games (e.g., massively multiplayer worlds in which players create story nodes to drive the plot), and personal information architecture (e.g., a geographically-anchored personal life history device). By focusing on children as the target audience, this research will also make substantial contributions to the emerging domain of child-centered computing. In particular, this work will lay the foundation for further investigation into how story and narrative can be used to create computational systems that even very young children can readily utilize. The environmental themes of the system will also conform to both national and California state guidelines for science education, thus giving it the potential to be broadly deployed in formal classroom settings as well as in informal learning contexts such as homes and science museums.