BBC Research and Development blog: Could the Mythology Engine be applied to online news stories?
Interesting prototype from the BBC for a new way to explore the stories, characters and archives of drama series.
The video below explains how the Mythology Engine works:
“The featured characters stories and things all link to other places in the Mythology Engine,” says the video.
While the idea is currently being applied to fictional series and dramas, such as Doctor Who, the alternative way of navigating through an ongoing story, of learning more about the key characters and events and being able to discover the connections between these is an interesting prospect for news storytelling.
And should this model and framework make us think differently about how we write and produce stories? Could we start to create narratives that are tailored for the web?
We’re already seeing experiments by news organisations with presenting ongoing stories with deep archives, such as the New York Times work with Google on the Living Stories project, and ongoing topics featuring characters with multiple connections and important backgrounds, like Channel 4′s Who Knows Who politics site.
The Mythology Engine goes a step further in the way it uses data to link elements of the story together and present them in an exciting and explorable format for users – could a version of this be created for more rapidly updating, unpredictable news events?
