Paper by Ségolène Tarte, David De Roure and Pip Willcox, presented at 2nd International Workshop on the Theory and Practice of Social Machines, in conjunction with WWW2014, Seoul, Korea, 7 April 2014. Proceedings in ACM Digital Library dx.doi.org/10.1145/2567948.2578839, preprint on http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/ora:8033

1. By Ségolène Tarte, David De Roure*
and Pip Willcox
Working out the Plot
The Role of Stories in
Social Machines
* @dder

2. Real life is and must be full of all kinds of social
constraint – the very processes from which society
arises. Computers can help if we use them to
create abstract social machines on the Web:
processes in which the people do the creative work
and the machine does the administration... The
stage is set for an evolutionary growth of new
social engines. The ability to create new forms of
social process would be given to the world at large,
and development would be rapid.
Berners-Lee, Weaving the Web, 1999 (pp. 172–175)
Social Machines

3. New Social Process

4. www.zooniverse.org

5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pea_galaxy

6. http://arxiv.org/abs/0907.4155

7. Scientists
Talk
Forum
Image
Classification
data reduction
Citizen Scientists

10. “Yet Wikipedia and its stated ambition to “compile the sum of all
human knowledge” are in trouble. The volunteer workforce that
built the project’s flagship, the English-language Wikipedia—and
must defend it against vandalism, hoaxes, and manipulation—
has shrunk by more than a third since 2007 and is still shrinking…
The main source of those problems is not mysterious. The loose
collective running the site today, estimated to be 90 percent
male, operates a crushing bureaucracy with an often abrasive
atmosphere that deters newcomers who might increase
participation in Wikipedia and broaden its coverage…”
http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/520446/the-decline-of-wikipedia/

11. The Yongle Encyclopedia
(simplified Chinese:
; traditional Chinese:
; pinyin: Yǒnglè
Dàdiǎn; literally The Great
Canon or Vast Documents
of the Yongle Era) was a
Chinese compilation of
information commissioned
by the Ming Dynasty
emperor Yongle in 1403
and completed by 1408. It
was the world's largest
known general
encyclopedia at its time,
unsurpassed for six
centuries.
http://yongledadian.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/volume/f0a4265c-c914-42fb-8a52-0eefc44cfa2a
Over two thousand scholars
worked on the project under the
direction of the Yongle Emperor,
who reigned from 1402 to 1424.
The scholars incorporated 8,000
texts from ancient times through
the early Ming Dynasty. Many
subjects were covered, including
agriculture, art, astronomy, drama,
geology, history, literature,
medicine, natural sciences, religion
and technology, as well as
descriptions of unusual natural
events.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yongle_Encyclopedia

12. http://www.publicbooks.
org/nonfiction/books-
not-moocs
theopenutopia.org

13. pynchonwiki.com

15. Stories within
Social Machines
Stories about Social Machines
Social
Machines for
stories
Now we consider...
SOCIAL MACHINES AS STORIES

16. Why adopt a storytelling perspective to study
Social Machines? This idea is rooted in the
observation that much attention has been
given to the internal functioning of a Social
Machine, thereby tipping the balance towards
the “machinery” side of Social Machines; the
question that remains wide open and
relatively unexplored is the following: what is
social about a Social Machine? By adopting a
storytelling view on Social Machines, we
facilitate the exposition and expression of
their sociality.

17. Are we looking
for machines
or for socials?
sociality

18. Rather than looking at a Social Machine
as an entity where the “machinery” is a
set structure of hardware, software, and
assigned roles that would somehow allow
for sociality (how?), we consider the
“machinery” as plotpoints through which
stories can pass, allowing for non-
deterministic communication, for non-
combinatorial circulation of ideas, for
non-preset cooperation, for innovation,
for invention, and thereby for sociality.

19. STORYTELLING AS A STETHOSCOPE
FOR SOCIAL MACHINES
1. Sociality through storytelling potential
and realization
2. Sustainability through reactivity and
interactivity
3. Emergence through collaborative
authorship and mixed authority
Zooniverse is a highly
storified Social Machine
Facebook doesn’t allow
for improvisation
Wikipedia assigns
authority rights rigidly

20. segolene.tarte@oerc.ox.ac.uk
david.deroure@oerc.ox.ac.uk
pip.willcox@bodleian.ox.ac.uk
Thanks to Kevin Page, Zooniverse, Bodleian Libraries and attendees of the Social Sciences
and the Social Machine workshop (Oxford, September 2013)
ne Tarte, David De Roure and Pip Willcox, (2014). Working out the plot: the role of stories in
social machines. 2nd International Workshop on the Theory and Practice of Social Machines, in
conjunction with WWW2014, Seoul, Korea, 7 April 2014. Proceedings in ACM Digital Library
dx.doi.org/10.1145/2567948.2578839, preprint on http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/ora:8033
SOCIAM: The Theory and Practice of Social Machines is funded by the UK Engineering and Physical
Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) under grant number EPJ017728/1 and comprises the Universities
of Southampton, Oxford and Edinburgh. See sociam.org