A study of narrative creation by means of crowds and niches

Online video constitutes the largest, continuously growing portion of the Web content. Web users drive this growth by massively sharing their personal stories on social media platforms as compilations of their daily visual memories, or with animated GIFs and memes based on existing video material. Therefore, it is crucial to gain understanding of the semantics of video stories, i.e., what do they capture and how. The remix of visual content is also a powerful way of understanding the implicit aspects of storytelling, as well as the essential parts of audio-visual (AV) material. In this paper we take a digital hermeneutics approach to understand what are the visual attributes and semantics that drive the creation of narratives. We present insights from a nichesourcing study in which humanities scholars remix keyframes and video fragments into micro-narratives i.e., (sequences of) GIFs. To support the narrative creation for humanities scholars a specific video annotation is needed, e.g., (1) annotations that consider literal and abstract connotations of video material, and (2) annotations that are coarse-grained, i.e., focusing on keyframes and video fragments as opposed to full length videos. The main findings of the study are used to facilitate the automatic creation of narratives in the digital humanities exploratory search tool DIVE+1