People who use folk tale database for research expect to get information that is based on structure of the story itself above anything else. In order to satisfy such expectation, it is need to construct database system that is able to recognize narrat...
People who use folk tale database for research expect to get information that is based on structure of the story itself above anything else. In order to satisfy such expectation, it is need to construct database system that is able to recognize narrative patterns and structures of stories. As a foundation of the system, I would suggest idea of machine readable narrative semiotic system. The summary of the my idea is as follows.
First, a event in a story can be presented in symbols indicating relations among subjects, actions and the objects. And the main things that characterize a story are attributes of the subjects and the objects in events of the story. Combinations of these attributes and relations create characteristics of a motif. Thus, machine readable narrative semiotic system have to be able to symbolize these elements in detail and precision.
Second, Greimas's narrative semiotic model that defines meaning of actions as changes of junctions is suited for coding narrative patterns of folke tale for information processing. While Greimas's model use only one type of junction between subjects and objects, I subdivide this into four : junction of space, junction of relation, junction of carnality, junction of message. I showed it is possible to express most of discoursively meaningful actions by simply combining these four.
Third, I exemplify that attributes of the actors(subjects and objects) could be translated into a machine recognizable pattern by setting up standardized categories of attributes over all types of folk tales, and combining these categories.
Fourth, in a process of modeling this human oriented narrative semiotics into database system, loading real data, and manipulating queries to the system, I exemplify that the database system can retrieve narrative patterns of stories -which is even quite difficult to express in natural language- by using machine readable narrative semiotic system.