Buzz: Telling Compelling Stories Sara H. Owsley, Kristian J. Hammond, David A. Shamma, Sanjay Sood Intelligent Information Laboratory Northwestern University 2133 Sheridan Road, Room 3-320 Evanston, Illinois 60208 +1 (847) 467-6924 {sowsley, hammond, ayman, sood}@cs.northwestern.edu ABSTRACT This paper describes a digital theater installation called Buzz. Buzz consists of virtual actors who express the collective voice gener- ated by weblogs (blogs). These actors find compelling stories from blogs and perform them. In this paper, we explore what it means for a story to be compelling and describe a set of techniques for re- trieving compelling stories. We also outline an architecture for high level direction of a performance using Adaptive Retrieval Charts (ARCs), allowing a director-level of interaction with the perfor- mance system. Our overall goal in this work is to build a model of human behavior on a new foundation of query formation, informa- tion retrieval and filtering. Categories and Subject Descriptors J.5 [Arts and Humanities]: Arts, fine and performing; H.3.3 [In- formation Search and Retrieval]: Information filtering General Terms Human Factors Keywords Network Arts, Emotion, Blogs, Media Arts, Culture, World Wide Web, Software Agents, Story Generation 1. INTRODUCTION Buzz is a multimedia installation that exposes the buzz generated by blogs. Buzz finds the weblogs (blogs) which are compelling; those where someone is laying their feelings on the table, expos- ing a dream or a nightmare that they had, making a confession or apology to a close friend, or regretting an argument that they had with their mother or spouse. It embodies the author (blogger) with virtual actors who externalize these monologues by reading them aloud. The focal point of the installation displays the most emo- Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. MM’06, October 23–27, 2006, Santa Barbara, California, USA. Copyright 2006 ACM 1-59593-447-2/06/0010 ...$5.00. Figure 1: An installation of Buzz in the Ford Engineering De- sign Center at Northwestern University. tional and evocative words from the monologue, shown as falling text. As an example of a Buzz performance, Table 1 shows three sto- ries read in a Buzz performance. The actors contribute to the perfor- mance by reading these discovered stories (found in blogs) aloud, in turn. The actors are attentive to each other by turning to face the actor currently speaking. The central screen (shown up close in Figure 2), displays the emotionally evocative words extracted from the current story being performed. To find compelling stories, Buzz mines the blogosphere (the col- lection of all blogs as a community), collecting blogs where the author describes an emotionally compelling situation: a dream, a nightmare, a fight, an apology, a confession, etc. After retriev- ing these blogs, Buzz performs affective classification to focus on blogs with a heightened emotional state. Other techniques includ- ing syntax filtering and colloquial filtering are used to ensure re- trieval of appropriate content for the performance. After passing through these filters, the resulting story selections are compelling and emotional. Several techniques are used to give Buzz a realistic feel and to make performances engaging to an audience. Dramatic ARCs are used to provide a higher level control of the performance, similar to that of a director. The actors are attentive to one another, turning to face the actor currently speaking. Gender classification is used to