Modifying Entity Relationship Models for Collaborative Fiction Planning and its Impact on Potential Authors

Abstract

We propose a modified Entity Relationship (E-R) model, traditionally used for software engineering, to structure, store and share plot data. The flexibility of E-R modelling has been demonstrated by its decades of usage in a wide variety of situations. The success of the E-R model suggests that it could be useful for collaborating fiction authors, adding a certain degree of computational power to their process. We changed the E-R model syntax to better suit the story plans, switching the emphasis from generic types to instanced story entities, but preserving relationships and attributes. We conducted a small-scale basic experiment to study the impact of using our modified E-R model on authors when understanding and contributing into a pre-existing fiction story plan. The results analysis revealed that the E-R model supports authors as effectively as written text in reading comprehension, memory, and contributing. In addition, the results show that, when combined together, the written text and the E-R model help participants achieve better comprehension--always within the frame of our experiment. We discuss potential applications of these findings.