Kim, Joy, Justin Cheng, and Michael S. Bernstein. “Ensemble: exploring complementary strengths of leaders and crowds in creative collaboration.” Proceedings of the 17th ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work & social computing. ACM, 2014.
Discussion Leader : Ananya
Summary:
Ensemble is a collaborative story writing platform where the leader maintains a high-level vision of the story and articulates creative constraints while the contributor contributes new ideas, comments or up votes on existing one.
Scenes are basic collaborative unit of each story. It may correspond to a turning pointing the story that reveals character development, new information and a goal for the next scene. The lead author creates a scene with a prompt and a short story description that suggests what problem the lead author wants to solve in this scene. The scene directs contributors towards specific sections that the author has chosen to be completed.
The contributors can participate via drafts, comments or votes. They can communicate with the author or discuss specific scenes using scene comments. Each scene might have multiple drafts from different contributors. The lead author maintains a creative control by choosing a winning draft for each scene. He can optionally appoint a moderator to edit drafts. He can directly add the draft as a part of original story or take inspiration from the contributions and write his own.
The authors evaluated their platform by running a short story writing competition using the platform, monitoring participant activity during the competition and conducting interviews with seven users. The results suggested that the lead authors spent a significant amount of time revising drafts while the moderators spent time mainly editing drafts created by the lead author and the contributors contributed somewhat more on creating comments.
Reflection:
The idea presented in this paper is not new. Several TV series have been incorporating similar technics for many years now where the series creator defines the story outline and each episode is written by a different member in the team. To me, the novel contribution in this paper, was using this concept to create a online platform for creative collaboration among people who may not know each other. Infact, one of the results analyzed in the paper was whether lead authors knew contributors previously. 4 out of 20 stories were written by teams made up of strangers. Although out of scope of this paper, I would still like to know how these 4 stories performed qualitatively in comparison to the stories by a team of friends.
The author mentioned 55 Ensemble stories were started but later only 20 of these stories were submitted as entries. Again some analysis on why more than 50% of the stories could not be completed would have been good. And team size of submitted stories ranged from 1 to 7 people. Compared to any crowdsourcing platform this number is minuscule which makes me wonder, can this platform successfully cater to a larger user base where hundreds of people collaborate to write a story (the authors also raise this question in the paper), like we see in any crowdsourced videos these days?
It would be interesting to see how this approach compares to traditional story writing methods, how quality varies when multiple people from different parts of the world collaborate to write a story, how their diverse background effect the flow of the story and how lead authors maneuvers through all these varieties to create the perfect story.
At the end, I feel Ensemble in its current stage is not a platform where a crowd collaborates to write a story rather a platform where crowd collaborates to improve someone else’s story.
Questions:
- In this paper, the authors advertised the competition on several writing forums. Will this strategy work in a more generic and paid platform like MTurk? If yes, do you think only mturkers with writing expertise be allowed to participate? And how should mturkers be paid?
- How will Ensemble handle ownership issues? Can this hamper productivity in the collaboration environment?
- The lead author has an uphill task of collecting all drafts/comments/suggestions and incorporating in the story. Do you think it is worth spending extra hours compiling someone else’s idea? How will English literature (assuming only English for now) per se, be benefited from a crowdsourced story?
