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Fox Harrell
Fox Harrell's work focuses on the development of computer-media-narrative and authoring software that
uses elements of interactivity, social critique, cross-cultural narrative; cognitive semantics;
gaming; and the social aspects of user-interface design. His seminal GRIOT System uses code to create/generate
interactive and significant "polymorphic" poems -- such as The Girl with Skin of Haints and Seraphs
and Walking Blues Changes Undersea. GRIOT (named for West African storytellers who often incorporate
improvisation in their performances) uses a combination of knowledge engineering, interactivity,
cultural identity, and Joseph Goguen's mathematical approach to meaning representation
called algebraic semiotics. Harrell has also worked with Kenny Chow to create a "new form of concrete
polymorphic poetry inspired by Japanese renku poetry, iconicity of Chinese character forms, and
generative models from contemporary art." [1]
His work provides a basis for interactive and generative multimedia systems. In his book chapter for
Second Person [2] Harrell has stated that his "longer-term project involves using this technical
and theoretical framework as a basis for creating further computational narrative artworks where in addition
to textual input, users can interact with graphical or gamelike interfaces. This user interaction will
still drive the generation of new metaphors and concepts, but along with text will also result in blends
of graphical and/or audio media." Indeed, his recent projects such as the in-progress
Living Liberia Fabric, an interactive narrative peace memorial affiliated with the Truth
and Reconciliation of Liberia, have fulfilled this early objective.
Fox Harrell's work has been published, performed and exhibited internationally,
including the University of Toronto Press, MIT Press, Elsevier, Springer-Verlag, CTheory,
The Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, The Fibreculture Journal,
and the Electronic Literature Organization, and he is the recipient of the National Science
Foundation CAREER Award for his project "Computing for Advanced Identity Representation."
His book, Phantasmal Media: An Approach to Imagination, Computation, and
Expression, is in press for MIT Press. He was recently named in
the Artforum Top 10.
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1. D. Fox Harrell and Kenny K. N. Chow
The GRIOT system was invented by Fox Harrell, and it comprises technical support for
implementing narrative and other forms of computational discourse with the following characteristics:
generative content, semantics-based interaction, reconfigurable discourse structure, and strong cognitive
and socio-cultural grounding. Strong cognitive and socio-cultural grounding here implies that
meaning is considered to be contextual, dynamic, and embodied. The formalizations used
derive from cognitive linguistics theories with such notions of meaning. Furthermore,
the notion of narrative here is not biased toward one particular cultural model. Using semantically
based media elements as a foundation, an author can implement a range of culturally specific or
experimental narrative structures.
The GRIOT Architecture
The following describes the GRIOT architecture as used in initial text-based experiments with
narratively structured poetry. User input, in the form of keywords, is used to select
the conceptual space network from a set of ontologies, called "theme domains," that each
contain sets of axioms about a particular theme. These axioms consist of binary relations
between sorted constants. This conceptual space network, called an "input diagram," consists
of a generic space, two input spaces, and mappings from the generic space to each of
the input spaces. The input diagram is passed as input to the ALLOY conceptual blending algorithm.
ALLOY is the core component of GRIOT that is responsible for generating new content.
An "output diagram," consisting of a blended conceptual space and morphisms from the input
spaces to the blended space, is output by ALLOY. Concepts are combined according to principles
that produce "optimal" blends. Typically this optimality results in "common sense" blends,
but for particular poetic effects different, "dis-optimal" criteria can be utilized.
"Phrase templates," granular fragments of poetry organized by narrative clause type,
are combined with the output of ALLOY (converted to natural language by mappings called
"grammar morphisms") to result in poems that differ not only in how the phrases are
selected and configured, but in the meaning being expressed by the blended concepts.
The phrases are said to be "instantiated" when they are combined with the natural language
representations of the blends by replacing "wildcards" in the text. These wildcards are tokens
representing where generated output can be incorporated; they also contain variables that
specify how they are to be replaced, e.g. constraining the choice of theme domains, or
selecting the lexical form to be mapped to by the grammar morphism. These templates are
selected according to an automaton called a "Narrative Structure Machine," which also
structures the reading of user input.
The server consists of the following components:
Graphical assets are actual image data files. These assets are described on the server
side using semantic annotation. (the relationship between the metadata and image data files
is indicated by a dotted line in the Multimedia Semantics Figure above) This annotation,
using XML that is parsed and processed to produce LISP data structures, describes the
visual, structural, and conceptual content of images.
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