This article presents a novel and highly interactive process to generate natural language narratives based on our ongoing work on semiotic relations, providing four criteria for composing new narratives from existing stories. The wide applicability of this semiotic reconstruction process is suggested by a reputed literary scholar's deconstructive claim that new narratives can often be shown to be a tissue of previous narratives. Along, respectively, three semiotic axes – syntagmatic, paradigmatic, and meronymic – existing stories can yield new stories by the combination, imitation, or expansion of an iconic scene; lastly, a new story may emerge through reversal via an antithetic consideration, i.e., through the adoption of opposite values. Targeting casual users, we present a fully operational prototype with a simple and user-friendly interface that incorporates an AI agent, namely ChatGPT. The prototype, in a coauthor capacity, generates context-compatible sequences of events in storyboard format using backward-chaining abductive reasoning (employing Stable Diffusion to draw scene illustrations), conforming as much as possible to the user's authorial instructions. The extensive repertoire of book and movie summaries available to the AI agent obviates the need to manually supply laborious and error-prone context specifications. A user study was conducted to evaluate user experience and satisfaction with the generated narratives. The preliminary findings suggest that our approach has the potential to enhance story quality while offering a positive user experience.
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How to conceptualize online sociability in the 21st century? To answer this question, Communities at a Crossroads looks back at the mid-2000s. With the burst of the creative-entrepreneur alliance, the territorialisation of the internet and the commercialization of interpersonal ties, that period constituted a turning point for digital communitarian cultures. Many of the techno-libertarian culture’s utopias underpinning the ideas for online sociability faced systematic counter evidence. This change in paradigm has still consequences today.Avoiding both empty invocations of community and swift conclusions of doom, Annalisa Pelizza investigates the theories of actions that have underpinned the development of techno-social digital assemblages after the ‘golden age’ of online communities. Communities at a Crossroads draws upon the analysis of Ars Electronica’s Digital Communities archive, which is the largest of its kind worldwide, and in doing so presents a multi-faceted picture of internet sociability between the two centuries.Privileging an anti-essentialist, performative approach over sociological understandings of online communities, Communities at a Crossroads proposes a radical epistemological turn. It argues that in order to conceptualize contemporary online sociability, we need first to abandon the techno-libertarian communalist rhetoric. Then, it is necessary to move beyond the foundational distinction between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, and adopt a material semiotic approach. In the end, we might have to relinquish the effort to define online or digital communities and engage in more meaningful mapping exercises.
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This article provides a description of the emergence of the Spanish ‘Occupy’ movement, Democracia real ya. The aim is to analyse the innovative discursive features of this movement and to connect this analysis to what we consider the innovative potential of the critical sciences. The movement is the result of a spontaneous uprising that appeared on the main squares of Madrid and Barcelona on 15 May 2011 and then spread to other Spanish cities. This date gave it its name: 15M. While the struggle for democracy in Spain is certainly not new, the 15M group shows a series of innovative features. These include the emphasis on peaceful struggle and the imaginary of a new democracy or worldview, transmitted through innovative placards and slogans designed by Spanish citizens. We consider these innovative not only due to their creativity, but also because of their use as a form of civil action. Our argument is that these placards both functioned as a sign of protest and, in combination with the demonstrations and the general dynamics of 15M, helped to reframe the population’s understanding of the crisis and rearticulate the identity of the citizens from victims to agents. In order to analyse the multimodal character of this struggle, we developed an interdisciplinary methodology, which combines socio-cognitive approaches that consider ideological proposals as socio-cognitive constructs (i.e. the notion of narrative or cognitive frame), and Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) in the analysis of discourses related to processes of social imagination and transformation. The socio-constructivist perspective is used to consider these discourses in relation to their actors, particular contexts and actions. The use of CDA, which included a careful rhetoric analysis, helped to analyse the process of deconstruction, transformation and reconstruction that 15M uses to maintain its struggle. The narrative analysis and the discursive theoretical concept of articulation helped to methodologically show aspects of the process of change alluded to above. This change was both in terms of cognition and in the modification of identity that turned a large part of the Spanish population from victims to indignados and to the neologism indignadanos, which is a composition of indignado and ciudadano (citizen).
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