Human activities can now be captured in real-time using sensor technology. The growth in sensor applications and smart mobile phones that come equipped with built-in sensors has led to the integration of sensors with social networks. These days, people are heavily dependent on online social networks (OSNs); they migrate their real-life activities online through various types of multimedia such as photos, videos, text, etc., which turns OSNs into a soft-sensory resource about users' events. The users use these forms of multimedia to tell their friends about their daily lives. This social network data can be crawled to build personal context-aware stories about individuals. However, the number of social users and the quantity of multimedia that is produced on social media are both growing exponentially, which leads to the challenge of information overload on OSNs. The information needed for stories, such as events and their locations, is not fully available on user's own profile. It is true that part of the information can be retrieved from the user's timeline, but a large number of events and related multimedia information is only available on friends' profiles. In this thesis, we focus on identifying a subset of close friends in order to enrich the content of the story. The amount of time people spend together has been proven to play a key role in determining close ties between people. We propose a DST (Days Spent Together) algorithm to find a user's closest friends based on the days they spent together interacting face-to-face. With the closest friends information, we are able to find additional information to complement what was found on the user's own profile, as well as to personalize the stories to ensure that they are only about the users and their closest friends. Due to the possibility of multimedia (photos in this thesis) overload for events, we propose to use the duration of events measured by DST, to determine the number of representative photos for each event. Our experiments show that the proposed approach could recognize the close friends of users and rank them from the strongest to the weakest. The results also show that with the proposed method we get days-spent-together values that are close to the corresponding true values provided by users.

It is now well known that linguistically interactive experiences with stories during the preschool years develop the child's knowledge about written language, along with abilities to construct meaning from literary forms of language. Storytime as a literacy activity in school is just beginning to be explored. It appears that there are ways of eliciting and interpreting children's implicit responses to stories which positively affect their thinking, understanding, and sensitivity about literature. In turn, these responses strengthen the foundation of the kind of critical reading abilities necessary for the continuation of literacy development. The purpose of this study was to investigate whether a teacher reading selected books and practicing specific teacher interaction behaviors during group storytime would increase the critical responses about literature from a group of children. A pretest-posttest nonequivalent group design was used. Subjects were two intact groups of upper middle class kindergarten children who attended either morning or afternoon sessions in the same school with the same teacher. The researcher read the treatment group ten different stories, one per day, over the period of ten days. During this time, the researcher practiced specific teacher interaction behaviors with the group. For the same period of time, the researcher read random books to the nontreatment group and did not practice specific teacher interaction behaviors. The comments and questions arising from three pretest storytimes and three posttest storytimes for each group were coded according to an author-adapted matrix instrument composed of ten literary elements and four levels of knowledge. The children in the treatment group gave significantly more critical responses than the children in the nontreatment group. Qualitative observations during the study indicated the need to develop means of identifying and evaluating behaviors of both teachers and children related to literature and literacy learning. / Education, Faculty of / Language and Literacy Education (LLED), Department of / Graduate

Deconstructed Cartography is comprised of two related and complementary sections that use mapping structures to explore the temporality of location through the lens of personal experience within places. This body of work uses both collage and a light-shadow installation to develop a narrative of place and time. My artwork focuses on deconstructing classical modes of representation through the lens of cartography and places an emphasis on personal experiences, narratives, and storytelling of place or locale. I am interested in road maps, water bodies, topography, shadows, and the various ways humans attempt to navigate or make sense of the natural world through lines and different mapping structures. / Includes bibliography. / Thesis (MFA)--Florida Atlantic University, 2021. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection

Thesis advisor: Richard Kearney / This thesis is an investigation of the epistemological and ethical reasons why philosophers might consider writing stories to communicate their ideas rather than nonfiction. It considers the consequences of empathizing with fictional characters, as well as the ways in which stories better capture reality than essays. The thesis also looks at the therapeutic power of storytelling. Does fiction offer deeper insights about death that cannot be taught through argumentative essays? Is the form of storytelling better at talking about death? These are the questions that ultimately sparked this thesis. / Thesis (BA) — Boston College, 2021. / Submitted to: Boston College. College of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Departmental Honors. / Discipline: Philosophy.

AN ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION OF Elaine Conrad, for the Doctor of Philosophy degree in Communication Studies, presented on September 21, 2018, at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. TITLE: “I WANT TO TELL YOU MY STORY”: THE POTENTIAL OF NARRATIVE TO BRIDGE CULTURAL DIVIDE MAJOR PROFESSOR: Dr. Nilanjana Bardhan In this dissertation, I examine a strange kind of divide or disconnect that occurs between international students and U.S.-American students. While international students studying in the United States are often strongly interested in forming connections within their newly adopted country and are anxious to get to know and make new friends with U.S.-American students as well as with other community members, it is not always reciprocated by their U.S.-American counterparts. According to data collected in a survey at Midwestern University, frequently U.S.-Americans lack the same motivation for forming connections, find conversing with international students “awkward” at best, threatening or frightening at worst, and view international students as “very foreign,” “strange,” and “too different from me.” Some are fearful of even beginning a conversation, afraid that they will say or do the wrong or politically incorrect thing. Or they may purposely distance themselves from anyone they perceive as different from themselves, preferring that those they view as different stay “someplace else” as far away as possible. My principal concern and overall question in this dissertation is how to begin to bridge these gaps between U.S.-American students and international students so the divide does not become even greater when they leave the protected environment of a college campus and venture out in the world. Perhaps a good starting point to begin to build bridges toward such understanding is through narrative and the stories that international students tell. Stories connect people. They ii draw us in and engage us. It seems only natural to turn in the direction of narratives about the challenges international students experience while negotiating their newly adopted culture in the United States as that potential connecting point, and to begin with audiences of primarily U.S.-American students and community members. In this qualitative study, I was a participant observer in the U.S.-American audiences for the presentations delivered by international students who volunteered to tell their personal stories about the challenges that they have faced. The topic and the exact nature of the challenges they experienced was left open regarding what information and what stories they chose to share with their audiences. I followed up each presentation by conducting qualitative interviews with the 6 female international students involved. In addition, I conducted interviews with 10 audience members who participated and volunteered to be interviewed. My interest was in learning what the U.S.-American students and community members heard when listening to the narratives, stories about how these international students have constructed and negotiated their identities in relation to their “Other” (in this case those of us who are U.S. American). Did U.S.-Americans pick up the same messages that the story-tellers believed that they were delivering? What questions were the audience members motivated to ask? What did they learn from listening to the storytellers’ stories? Did they gain any new insights? Were there commonalities between the different audience members who volunteered to be interviewed? And did they hear common messages? Regarding the students telling their stories, I was interested in discovering what they chose to discuss as well as how much they chose to disclose, and if they gained any insights from the process of telling their stories or from questions that the audience members asked or did not ask. What were their observations about the audience and the audience reactions? How did they iii feel when they were telling their stories? Did the process of telling their stories impact their own identities? There were similar themes that both the storytellers and their audience members discussed during their interviews; however, the subthemes differed. The primary themes that the storytellers believed that they focused on were: cultural issues and differences, religious perceptions, and to a lesser degree, language and communication. While these primary themes were consistent across the storyteller narratives, how strongly they were emphasized and what subthemes were discussed differed from storyteller to storyteller. Among the audience members, the themes heard and discussed were similar to those of the storytellers; however, when the U.S.-Americans discussed cultural differences, they emphasized similarities as opposed to differences, and focused more on communication and language challenges. Religious perceptions were viewed through a western, mostly Christian lens. Subthemes mentioned by U.S.-Americans were bullying, gender, and stereotypes. When I began this dissertation, many of us in the United States were celebrating our first Black president and I, along with many others, hoped that U.S.-Americans would begin to feel more comfortable with diversity in that new and historic reality. However, the political environment has changed once again. Unfortunately, many U.S.-Americans appear to feel even more threatened by diversity, viewing those who are “different” from themselves with ever increasing amounts of anxiety, fear, xenophobia and anger, which are fueled by almost daily news reports. In the current environment, narrative has become even more important as a way to connect and begin to better understand each other, with the potential of bridging cultural divide.

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The ontology of organizational story begs us to discover when stories work best and why. Is there a best practice for creating and telling stories? This study examined one organization's use of storytelling as a means of facilitating an innovation and what happened from the perspective of the storyteller. The study revealed the role of storytelling during the organizational initiative. This qualitative study analyzed eleven written and oral stories using grounded theory. Also using grounded theory, six tellers' interviews were analyzed to gain the tellers' perspective of the role of story. Storyteller selection was based on those who had consistently told the stories throughout the initiative and were interested in the effort being successful. The study revealed an implicit message that was intended to be understood in gaining full acceptance of the initiative. Based on the results of this study, the story promoting innovation contained four consistent characteristics: event, dilemma, consequence(s) and outcome. The true event used in the story was relevant and known by most personnel. The dilemma contained the implicit tension created when choosing to go against the organizational practice and norm. The consequence(s) in the story always conveyed success. The outcome represented the personal benefits obtained. To improve on the story used to promote the new knowledge management innovation, the organization might further examine its explicit and implicit norms and address the emergent concerns and vulnerabilities of the characters in the story. / Ph. D.

In September of 2013, I challenged myself to find the conjunction between spaces and tales through Architecture, to create buildings, spaces...to design out of tales. A year after, in September 2014, I realized that I became a writer myself. I wrote my own fiction, my own tale. Through the pages of this book, I am sharing with you my story, and the story of how I wrote it. The story of me AT the WAAC, of me AND the WAAC. The story of how, while writing it, I fall in love with Architecture and I learnt how to be an architectural magician. / Master of Architecture