Collective Story Writing through Linking Images Auroshikha Mandal, Mehul Agarwal and Malay Bhattacharyya Department of Information Technology Indian Institute of Engineering Science and Technology, Shibpur Howrah – 711103, India E-mail: malaybhattacharyya@it.iiests.ac.in Abstract Collaborative creativity is the approach of employing crowd to accomplish creative tasks. In this paper, we present a collaborative crowdsourcing platform for writing stories by means of connecting a series of ‘images’. These connected images are termed as Image Chains, reflecting successive sce- narios. Users can either start or extend an Image Chain by up- loading their own image or choosing from the available ones. These users are allowed to pen their stories from the Image Chains. Finally, stories get published based on the number of votes obtained. This provides an organized framework of story writing unlike most of the state-of-the-art collaborative editing platforms. Our experiments on 25 contributors high- light their interest in growing shorter Image Chains but voting longer Image Chains. Introduction Crowdsourcing involves using the power of crowd to per- form a task (Brabham 2008). The sheer power in involving the mass to distribute a job of big proportions makes this idea successful in performing various kinds of tasks, skilled or not-so skilled, technical or creative (Kittur et al. 2013). The aim of this study is to exercise the power of crowdsourc- ing for carrying out tasks like collaborative story writing, and creative plot building, a field which can not be auto- mated by machines. As the people fill in their text descrip- tions to make stories, we intend to record the input in the form of creative links between story elements in the form of images (depicting scenarios). Like any crowdsourcing plat- forms, this too thrives on the abundance of data. As the num- ber of people interacting with the interface increases, the ac- curacy, diversity and content on the platform also rises. To employ this idea for creative plot building, we have primar- ily studied the existing collaborative editors and gained in- sights. This is finally used to design a platform that provides an image based interaction. The stories are basically written through connecting images, termed as Image Chains. This creates a universal platform to merge together ideas of dif- ferent crowd workers. It has the capability to create growing and evolving stories with time involving increased number of users and is, thus, a step toward organized story writing. * Works-in-Progress, Sixth AAAI Conference on Human Compu- tation and Crowdsourcing (HCOMP 2018), Zurich, Switzerland. Copyright c  2018, Retained by the authors. All rights reserved. Related Work Creative Crowdsourcing is currently a highly exercised con- cept, with many small start-ups using it to accomplish tasks and attract users. Platforms like DesignHill (DesignHill 2014) exploit the inputs from crowd workers to help design logos for postings made by people. Another popular plat- form SquadHelp (SquadHelp 2011) employs crowdsourcing to name products and ideas. Graphic designing is also done using crowd inputs by the platforms like 99designs.com (99Designs 2008). However, these platforms work by select- ing only one from multiple inputs provided by the crowd contributors. They essentially pick the best out of a pool, with the crowd helping to fill that pool. CorpWiki is a self-regulating wiki system for effective ac- quisition of high-quality knowledge content from the corpo- rate employees (Lykourentzou et al. 2010). However, such platforms are not for creative tasks. Collabowriters is a plat- form that turns crowdsourced inputs into novels. People are allowed to enter lines consisting of a maximum 140 char- acters, and they are subsequently voted to decide the most popular one. The highest voted line is then added as the next sentence to a novel (Collabowriters 2012). This short lived project has tried to build a well written, coherent story of the size of a book, with the help of crowd. However, we aim at making short stories at first, with the idea be- ing to link creative thoughts together. There are also some Wiki-based interfaces for collaborative story writing. One such platform asks students to edit on a common platform, with an interface like Microsoft Word, and builds new sto- ries through posting a discussion (Hamid 2012). The users of this platform have reported that the interface is not receptive to multiple people editing a document simultaneously. This platform also suffers from the problem of content deletion by the other users whenever a new story is being formed. The users have also noticed the lack of an interactive way to add ideas to a story. Some platforms (Storybird 2008), (Inklewriter 2011), (Wattpad 2006) allow users to write a complete story online on a platform, such that people can view their stories. An online audience provides continuous feedback to the writers, helping them guide the story, and also to improve the content. This in turn also provides read- ers with a place to read new stories written by crowd work- ers. However, these sites work on adding complete stories, and are focused more toward an online platform to judge and