Digital heritage and avatars of stories

A relevant issue in the annotation of digital heritage is the abstraction of concepts in a cross--media context. This is true in the case of dramatic media (e.g., screenplay, performance, TV series, video-game, feature film), where the performance has the same relevance of the text, and can be read as a text itself. The primary notion underpinning these two types of texts is the story, with its dramatic qualities shared among the different texts. Thus, following Ryan's definition of "avatar of story", each format can be seen as an avatar of this primary notion This paper presents a system for the collaborative annotation of the story elements in media heritage. Story elements are employed to describe the dramatic qualities (e.g., story agents, agents' goals, conflicts of agents), abstracting from the specific media in which they appear. The system consists of an ontology--based schema and a web platform for the annotation of the dramatic metadata on the digital heritage items (in textual or audiovisual form). The paper also describes a module for the visualization and exploration of such metadata, for cross--comparisons in drama studies. The system was tested on the comparison between the agent's intentions in the story representation and the incidents appearing in the timelines of the specific performances.