Human beings can debate and discuss structural similarities between narratives, stories, takes and myths. They can notice parallels in the Deluge Myths of the Bible, the Puranic story of Manu and the Gilgamesh epos and compare them; they can debate whether two movies have 'the same plot' or not.

It is part of the human intellect to see and compare structure; what structural properties of narratives make them resemble? This big question about human understanding was addressed by the structuralists, but the admirable AI research on Story Understanding got bogged down in the detailed and complicated analysis of natural language used to tell the stories.

Roughly, this distinction of the structure of a story versus the detailed account of the story corresponds to the narratological distinction of 'story' versus 'discourse'. In our project, we returned to the big question by means of comparatively simple, logic-based description languages that are developed in very close contact with an empirical basis of actual narratives.

18–31 August 2013 Two-week course Digitalisierung und Formalisierung von Erzählstruktur at the Sommerakademie XV 2013 of the Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes (Teachers from WMSS: BF, BL)

4–6 August 2013 Workshop on Computational Models of Narrative 2013 in Hamburg, a satellite workshop of
CogSci 2013: The 35th meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, (Organizers from WMSS: BF, BL)

8–10 March 2013 Seminar „Formale Ansätze in der Erzählforschung“ (“Formal Approaches to Narrative Reseach”), organised by Deniz Sarikaya in the programme „StipendiatInnen machen Programm“ of the Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes. (Organiser: DS; Speakers from WMSS: AK, BF, BL)

July 2012 Digital Humanities 2012 in Hamburg: Panel Computational models of narrative structure (members: RB, BF, BL), later meeting with representatives of the Interdisciplinary Center for Narratology (AB, BF, AK, BL, DS)

May 2012 Workshop on Computational Models of Narrative 2012 at the International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC) in İstanbul (Participants: BF, AK, BL). Papers:

• Objectivity and reproducibility of Proppian narrative annotations
• Which dimensions of narratives are relevant for human judgments of story equivalence?

February 2012 Work meeting at the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences, Cambridge. (Participants: AB, BF, BL, DS)

January/February 2012 Intensive research meeting at the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences, Cambridge (Participants: BF, CL, BL)

October 2011 Kick-off meeting at the Institute for Logic, Language and Computation in Amsterdam. (Participants: AB, BF, AK, CL, BL)

Bernhard Fisseni, Benedikt Löwe, What Makes Stories Similar? Report on a Research Project, 2011-2014, In: Mark A. Finlayson, Jan Christoph Meister, and Emile G. Bruneau (eds.), 2014 Workshop on Computational Models of Narrative, Open Access Series in Informatics, Volume 41, Dagstuhl Publishing 2014, pp. 9-12 (full paper; full proceedings)

Bernhard Fisseni, Aadil Kurji, and Benedikt Löwe, Annotating with Propp's Morphology of the Folktale: Reproducibility and Trainability, Literary and Linguistic Computing 29 (2014), pp. 488-510 (full paper)

Bernhard Fisseni and Benedikt Löwe, Event mappings for comparing formal frameworks of narratives, Logique et Analyse 57 (2014), pp. 181-222 (full paper)

Bernhard Fisseni, Benedikt Löwe (eds.), Formal and Computational Models of Narrative, special issue of the journal Sprache und Datenverarbeitung (Volume 37, Issue 1-2, 2013)

Mark A. Finlayson, Bernhard Fisseni, Benedikt Löwe, and Jan Christoph Meister (eds.), 2013 Workshop on Computational Models of Narrative, Open Access Series in Informatics, Volume 32, Dagstuhl Publishing 2013 (full proceedings)

Rens Bod, Bernhard Fisseni, Aadil Kurji and Benedikt Löwe (2012): Objectivity and reproducibility of Proppian narrative annotations. In: Proceedings of Computational Models of Narrative 2012 in İstanbul. (Preprint, full proceedings)

Bernhard Fisseni and Benedikt Löwe (2012): Which dimensions of narratives are relevant for human judgments of story equivalence? In: Proceedings of Computational Models of Narrative 2012 in İstanbul. (Preprint, full proceedings)

Alexander Block, Bernhard Fisseni, Carlos León, Benedikt Löwe and Deniz Sarikaya (2012): Narrative summarization and its correspondence to Proppian functions.

Alexander Block, Rens Bod, Bernhard Fisseni, Aadil Kurji, Carlos León, Benedikt Löwe and Deniz Sarikaya: Objectivity and reproducibility of formal narrative representations or annotations: Propp's Functions and Narrative Summarization.

Rens Bod, Benedikt Löwe and Sanchit Saraf (to appear 2012). How much do formal narrative annotations differ? A Proppian case study. In: Charles Ess and Ruth Hagengruber (eds.): The Computational Turn: Past, Presents, Futures? (Proceedings IACAP 2011 in Aarhus), Münster: MV-Wissenschaft, 242–245. (Preprint)

Benedikt Löwe (2011). Methodological remarks about comparing formal frameworks for narratives. In Patrick Allo and Giuseppe Primiero (eds.), Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop in the Philosophy of Information. Brussel: Koninklijke Vlaamse Academie van Belgié voor Wetenschappen en Kunsten, 10–28. (Preprint)

Benedikt Löwe (2010): Comparing Formal Frameworks of Narrative Structures, in: Mark Finlayson (ed.): Computational Models of Narrative. Papers from the 2010 AAAI Fall Symposium, Menlo Park 2010 [AAAI Technical Report FS-10-04], 45–46. (Preprint)