Part 2: Overview of the Editor

Previous: Splash Screen

Dismiss the "Message" popup and you'll see this screen in the Scheherazade editor (click to enlarge):

At the top of the screen are buttons for the three major panels in the Scheherazade editor:

• • Story Elements is essentially where you can declare nouns for use in your story.

  • Characters: animate beings, capable of agency

  • Locations: relative or absolute spatial placements

  • Props: non-agentive physical objects

  • Qualities: Attributes such as “handsomeness” or “height”

  • Behaviors: Activities such as a gathering or performance

  • Timelines is where you can declare actions and when they occur.

  • Interpretations is where you can declare the inner worlds of characters, in particular, why they do what they do.

The process of "modeling" (annotating) a story with Scheherazade essentially follows these steps. After reading the fable we want to annotate, we will:

• 1. Identify the nouns we want to use, such as characters, locations and props in the story, and declare them in the Story Elements panel

  2. Identify the actions we want to model, and invoke them in the Timelines panel

  3. Work in the Interpretations panel to model the inner goals and beliefs of characters

We'll get to those steps in a moment. For now, let's look around the rest of the editor:

• • The Original Story panel on the top-right has the text of the story we are annotating, as indicated in the splash screen

  • The Reconstructed Story panel has no meaningful content now, but after we start modeling actions, the system will insert here a natural-language reading of the story synthesized from the symbolic model. You can use the Reconstructed Story panel to see at a glance how much progress you've made in annotating the story.

  • Below the Reconstructed Story panel are:

    • An Undo button, which works as you'd expect

  • A Redo button, which works as you'd expect

  • A Control panel, with which you can save your story encoding

  • The Help button doesn't have much help yet, because I chose instead to write this tutorial on your very screen

Next: Declaring Nouns