Ensemble

Abstract

In story writing, the diverse perspectives of the crowd could support an author's search for the perfect character, setting, or plot. However, structuring crowd collaboration is challenging. Too little structure leads to unfocused, sprawling narratives, and too much structure stifles creativity. Motivated by the idea that individual creative leaders and the crowd have complementary creative strengths, we present an approach where a leader directs the high-level vision for a story and articulates creative constraints for the crowd. This approach is embodied in Ensemble, a novel collaborative story-writing platform. In a month-long short story competition, over one hundred volunteer users on the web started over fifty short stories using Ensemble. Leaders used the platform to direct collaborator work by establishing creative goals, and collaborators contributed meaningful, high-level ideas to stories through specific suggestions. This work suggests that asymmetric creative contributions may support a broad new class of creative collaborations.

Crowdsourcing Literature Reviews in New Domains

“…In this type of crowdsourcing, a leader maintains a high-level vision of the task and directs other crowd members (contributors) to make specific contributions towards this task. An example of leader-driven crowdsourcing is the collaborative writing system called Ensemble (Kim et al, 2014). We will build on the concept of leader-driven crowdsourcing in the proposed design below.…”

“…The design of the crowdsourcing platform proposed here draws on previous work on collaborative writing systems (Kim et al, 2014) and crowd-based clustering of documents (André et al, 2014). In a leader-driven crowdsourcing approach to collaborative writing (Kim et al, 2014), there are two types of participants: leaders and contributors.…”

“…In a leader-driven crowdsourcing approach to collaborative writing (Kim et al, 2014), there are two types of participants: leaders and contributors. Leaders constrain and specify the nature of the contributions: the lead author of a literature review sets the scope of the literature review and guides the synthesis.…”

Crowdsourcing Literature Reviews in New Domains

“…The design of the crowdsourcing platform proposed here draws on previous work on collaborative writing systems (Kim et al, 2014) and crowd-based clustering of documents (André et al, 2014). In a leader-driven crowdsourcing approach to collaborative writing (Kim et al, 2014), there are two types of participants: leaders and contributors. Leaders constrain and specify the nature of the contributions: the lead author of a literature review sets the scope of the literature review and guides the synthesis.…”

“…As shown in Figure 1, we conceptualize a literature review as a story or narrative. Each narrative consists of a series of chunks that we call scenes (Kim et al, 2014). Each scene is anchored around a writing goal (such as providing an overview of the literature review, defining key features of the topic of the review, identifying examples illustrating the topic, or identifying gaps in the literature).…”