A webapp for collaboratively writing artwork tales
Creators: name: Mula, Francesco Saverio
name: Montanelli, Stefano
name: Ruskov, Martin
Publisher: name: Zenodo
Year: 2023

description: In this paper, we describe "Canvas Conversation Tales" (CCT), a web application to create stories in the form of imaginary dialogues based on the visual content of a selected artwork. After selecting the painting to work on, users can compose their own conversations or continue someone else's story, with the ability to comment and vote on the imagined exchange of dialogue lines. This creation process turns out to be an example of crowdsourcing, more specifically of collaborative story writing, where with this term we identify an activity carried out online, by a group of people not supposed to know each other, producing a dialogue as a form of narrative as output.
Currently, a number of collaborative writing systems has been proposed in the literature, with focus on the creation of a range of different types of documents (e.g., essays, articles, reviews, explanations, summaries) in different fields (e.g., literature, entertainment, and education). We critically analyzed these solutions with the aim to identify pros and cons of the proposed approaches, by also considering reference surveys and review papers (Storch (2018), Feldman et al. (2020), and Montanelli and Ruskov (2023)) for better framing CCT with respect to the literature. To this end, we focused on systems characterized by asynchronous collaborative interactions. From our analysis, we claim that the main issues to be addressed concern reluctance to participate likely due to little knowledge of the work, tendency to create isolated contributions (the "walled garden" problem, as described by Colas et al., 2017), discomfort when modifying other people's parts (territoriality phenomenon, analyzed by Andrè et al., 2014), lack of communication with other contributors, and limited global view. In CCT, we tackled these points by enforcing different strategies. To encourage contribution, we provide an always-visible textual introduction to the artwork and available characters, as well as possible AI-generated suggestions when invoked by the contributor. We mitigate isolation of contributions by providing the possibility of branching other people's dialogues, in order to keep linked the versions and related authors. Moreover, the names of contributors as well as their countries are shown in CCT to give proper visibility to the multiple creators of a dialogue and to grant a form of "social reward" for their work (see Dunn and Hedges, 2013). According to Hahn et al. (2016), the vote-then-edit paradigm has proved to be successful in encouraging users to edit parts written by others. Thus, in CCT, we decided to enable contributors to express appreciation in the form of like-votes to support either a whole dialogue and/or a single line of dialogue. As discussed by Lichten et al. (2018), the mechanism of positive feedback, here facilitated through voting, also provides the additional advantage of enhancing participant motivation. We finally integrated a chat system to allow contributors to communicate with each other and exchange ideas, thus providing an additional mechanism to reduce the isolation issue of contributors.
The CCT application has been designed to intercept the widest possible audience, hence including solutions for desktop/mobile users, as well as for occasional visitors standing at public terminals within museums. By providing a creative and gamified experience of collaborative writing inside exhibition areas, we aim i) to improve the user engagement during the visit through online digital tools, ii) to foster people's connection with artworks and the messages they communicate. Through a model based on the exchange of dialogue lines, we aim to provide an attractive tool to involve young people (e.g. pupils in school groups visiting a museum) by offering them informal and extra-scholar learning/communication opportunities.
A case-study in the framework of the VAST H2020 project (Values Across Space and Time) is currently ongoing to evaluate CCT on concrete dialogue experiences provided by Italian students on selected artworks. The goal of the VAST project is to study the transformation of values across space and time, with particular emphasis on the core European Values like human dignity, freedom, democracy, equality, rule of law and human rights. In our case-study, we selected some artworks considered in VAST, and we exposed a classroom of students to the values that are explicitly or latently communicated through these artworks. Students have been invited to use CCT to create dialogues on the considered artworks, with the aim to elaborate on their own perception and feeling about the values, by also enabling them to collaborate and to create imaginary conversations in the form of "bickering" dialogues that express different positions on values.