Envisioning Narrative Intelligence: A Creative Visual Storytelling
  Anthology
Brett A. Halperin Stephanie M. Lukin
In this paper, we collect an anthology of 100 visual stories from authors who
participated in our systematic creative process of improvised story-building
based on image sequences. Following close reading and thematic analysis of our
anthology, we present five themes that characterize the variations found in
this creative visual storytelling process: (1) Narrating What is in Vision vs.
Envisioning; (2) Dynamically Characterizing Entities/Objects; (3) Sensing
Experiential Information About the Scenery; (4) Modulating the Mood; (5)
Encoding Narrative Biases. In understanding the varied ways that people derive
stories from images, we offer considerations for collecting story-driven
training data to inform automatic story generation. In correspondence with each
theme, we envision narrative intelligence criteria for computational visual
storytelling as: creative, reliable, expressive, grounded, and responsible.
From these criteria, we discuss how to foreground creative expression, account
for biases, and operate in the bounds of visual storyworlds.