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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The use of art (e.g. visualized narratives) in social work may stimulate dialogue between community members about family support in their neighbourhood. The Visualized Narratives on Parenting Interactions in the Neighbourhood (VN-PIN) were developed in order to foster this dialogue. The aim of this study was to evaluate the implementation of the VN-PIN in social work practice and to gain insight in mechanisms that stimulate dialogues supported by visualizations. A qualitative process evaluation was conducted to explore the use of the VN-PIN in various urban settings. We observed meetings (N = 14) where the VN-PIN was applied and interviewed professionals and community members (N = 81). The results of this study show that the VN-PIN intervention gives parents a voice and allows them to recognize and reflect on their own parenting behaviour, thereby contributing to mutual exchanges in a supportive community. The conclusion of this study is that the VN-PIN is a useful intervention that social work professionals can use to foster dialogues about parenting within diverse contexts in super-diverse neighbourhoods. The intervention fosters a supportive structure to share experiences of various community members. Future research is needed to further evaluate the experiences and satisfaction of community members with the intervention.
The “Creating Age-friendly Communities: Housing and Technology” publication presents contemporary, innovative, and insightful narratives, debates, and frameworks based on an international collection of papers from scholars spanning the fields of gerontology, social sciences, architecture, computer science, and gerontechnology. This extensive collection of papers aims to move the narrative and debates forward in this interdisciplinary field of age-friendly cities and communities. (This book is a reprint of the Special Issue Creating Age-friendly Communities: Housing and Technology that was published in Healthcare)
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