An Attempt of the Commercial Film Production Support System Based on the Image Rhetoric of Commercial Film

This chapter describes the concepts behind a Commercial Film Production Support System (CFPSS) in terms of related studies in the areas of advertising, image techniques and rhetoric, cognitive science, and information engineering. The chapter then analyzes the structure of commercial films to establish and describe an information system that is tested with a viewing experiment. The proposed system reflects the environment by implementing basic image techniques to create commercial films through an interaction between the users and the system. The experiment uses commercial films for beer with 55 participants. The results show that evaluations for image types related to the advertising story generate the most interest and high evaluations for the provider type of rhetoric stimulates willingness to buy. In terms of technique, mise-en-scène and editing attracts interest, and the advertising story associated with the product function and the supporting production and distribution stimulates willingness to buy.

Designing a Socially Open Narrative Generation System

The authors propose the design of a Socially Open Narrative Generation System (SONGS) that co-creates a collection of diverse narratives from a narrative generation program and people. This is a challenge of the social application of narrative generation technology used for vitalizing the social activity of producing and sharing narratives. The key idea is to connect and unify individual narrative productions by many agents, including a computer program and many humans, via a collection of narratives produced and accumulated by these agents. At the same time, SONGS is the practice of a computational approach to narratology as a model for the social process of narrative production. This chapter describes the key concepts and mechanism design of SONGS with several experimental programs.

Non-Story, Nostalgia, and Film Cognition

In addition to the stories' or characters' goal-directed actions, the non-story narrative and nostalgia aspects are important issues for narrative cognitions such as film cognition. In this chapter, the film cognitive effects related to re-defining nostalgia through cutting techniques and defamiliarization of narrative rhetoric are particularly analyzed. Using a cognitive and computational model, the rhetoric of the film is classified into four kinds of nostalgia including non-nostalgia, and analyzed in particular from the cognitive process perspective as it related to non-story and nostalgia. Next, a computerized classification is used to compose rhetoric and generate films for various kinds of nostalgia. The generated films revealed both the narrow story and broad non-story aspects of the rhetoric, narrative, and cognition of the past and the film.

The Dilemma of Suspense

The new generation Narratology shows a renewed heuristic scenario, involving an intense dialogue among Humanities, Cognitive Neuroscience and Computer Technology. The case of suspense is emblematic: the pleasure that suspense exercises on the human mind can be precisely explained by identifying the mechanisms of reward provided by neurological and imaging studies. At the same time, patterns of automatic generation of narrations highlight the profound implications of a heated debate between Narratology and Computer Technology, in order to understand the processes of reception and inference during the narrative immersion in storyworlds. At the end of their overview on of a cross-disciplinary approach to suspense analysis, the authors report a case study considered of interest, by a group of researched, called Liquid Narrative Group, of North Caroline State University.

Assessing the Appeal Power of Narrative Performance by using Eyeblink Synchronization among Audience

In this chapter, the authors showed that eyeblink synchronization enables researchers to investigate the appeal power of narrative performance empirically. The proposed method relies on the ability of audience members as epistemic agents to recognize and understand the performance. As spontaneous eyeblinks loosely co-vary with individual's allocation and release of attentions, the timings of eyeblinks could be entrained by the details of narrative performances as the common inputs. Thus, the standard basis accumulated by the collective eyeblink responses enables experimenter to judge whether or not a particular performance contains universal appeal to sense-making. Here, the authors introduced that the empirical studies to assess the appeal power of Rakugo (a traditional narrative performance). An expert artist, compared to a novice performer, created implicit breakpoints on participants' attentional process. It were discussed that the applicable scopes of the eyeblink relevant indices, upcoming research on eyeblink synchronization, and new research on human collective behaviors.

The Employment Status and Support Needs of Persons with Disabilities in Japan

This paper has two objectives: (1) to describe the significance and applicability of narratology, which features computational and cognitive approaches, in the field of interpersonal relationship supports for persons with disabilities, and (2) to determine effective work supports by analyzing the narratives of the persons with disabilities. In this chapter, the narratives were operationally defined as free-expression answers obtained from mail-survey questionnaires from people with various disabilities describing their work and work life. The questionnaires were sent to 14,448 people and, of these, 4,546 responded. The survey items included their employment status, problems they encountered before employment, problems in their working life, support required in their working life, and opinions regarding disability employment. The results suggested that employment status and problems at work depended on their disability type and the presence of effective supports.

Applying Digital Storytelling to Business Planning

Digital storytelling for business planning has two different modes of perception, thinking, and communication: the narrative and the logical scientific. This chapter pointed out how the structure and the contents of the digital storytelling work influence its effectiveness through examination of works and the audience's evaluation of the works. Critical points regarding the structure of work were the consistency and the balance. The most important link was from a contrast between the initial situation and obstruction in the narrative part, to key success factors deriving in the analytical part. The link represents what is the problem that the storyteller found. Regarding the contents of work, familiarity to the audience—a story of “something like you”—is effective in understanding, persuasiveness and empathy of the story's message.

Quantitative Research into Narrative

Stylometry is the application of quantitative analysis, primarily to written language, to identify variations in style. Statistical analysis of linguistic characteristics is applied to identify authorship, creation period, and creation order. This study involves stylometric research into “The Tale of Genji,” which is a Japanese classical literary work. “The Tale of Genji” is a long story consisting of 54 volumes. However, in the last 13 volumes, the content is different from that in the other volumes, and the writing quality differs from that of the previous 41 volumes; thus, it has long been theorized that the 13 volumes was written by a different author. The result of an analysis using the word frequency for auxiliary verbs found no evidence that positively support the theory of separate authorship. Therefore, the results indicate that the possibility that there are multiple authors of “The Tale of Genji” is low.

You Tell Me in Emojis

As communication is predominantly realized on digital platforms, both the language used and the way actors of communicative events create and perceive messages have changed and taken new forms and functions. Emoticons, which have been transformed into emojis, have become a new language phenomenon that promise new research areas in various fields from linguistics to media studies, cognitive science to narrative studies. This chapter aims at exploring how computer users have integrated emojis in their daily narrative practices not only as emotive devices but also as conceptual tools and create a new mode of language to communicate their stories on digital platforms.

Thesaurus with Predicate-Argument Structure to Provide Base Framework to Determine States, Actions, and Change-of-States

The goal with this chapter is to discuss the possibility of language resources in determining the states, actions, and change-of-states of characters in narratives. An overview of previous work on linguistic theory and language resources is given then the Predicate-Argument Structure Thesaurus (PT), a Japanese language resource constructed based on the extended framework of the Lexical Conceptual Structure (LCS), is proposed. The PT provides hierarchical clusters of synonyms for 11,900 predicates and 22,000 example sentences annotated with semantic role labels. Each concept has an abstracted LCS, and example sentences are attached to each concept. By virtue of the structure, a correlation of the arguments between other clusters can be determined. The semantic structure of the PT is investigated to enrich generated texts of narratives, and the high possibility of lexical semantics contributing to narrative processing is revealed.