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Also check proceedings from or International Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM) for human-centered studies of story scrapers.
For centuries, the metaphor of architecture has been inextricably linked to the art of storytelling. We speak of narrative "structures," character "arcs," and plot "blueprints." We describe scenes as being "built" and endings as "collapsing." However, in the modern era of fragmented attention spans and algorithmic curation, a new architectural metaphor has emerged to describe the contemporary storyteller: the "storyscraper." Unlike the architect who designs a building from the ground up, the storyscraper operates like the maintenance crew of a skyscraper, suspended on scaffolding, assembling meaning from the windows, ledges, and fragments of the world around them. The storyscraper is a curator of the collage, an artist who builds vertical towers of narrative not through invention, but through the meticulous arrangement of reality. storyscrapers
The rise of the storyscraper is a direct response to the information age. We live in a world saturated with data, headlines, status updates, and noise. To construct a traditional linear narrative from this chaos can feel artificial or reductive. The storyscraper embraces the chaos, treating the world as a quarry of raw materials. Much like the visual art of collage—where artists like Hannah Höch or Romare Bearden cut photographs from magazines to create new realities—the literary storyscraper cuts snippets of reality to build something new. This approach is evident in the rise of "found footage" films, docudramas, and novels that incorporate emails, text messages, and news clippings. The storyscraper acknowledges that the truth is rarely a straight line; it is a skyscraper built of stacked, distinct moments. Also check proceedings from or International Conference on
Would you like a one-page annotated summary of the Kazemi & Gandomi (2020) paper, or a list of related papers on narrative extraction algorithms? The storyscraper is a curator of the collage,
New Media & Society , Vol. 25, Issue 7, pp. 1823–1843 (2023) [Alternative real paper: "The Story Scraper: Automated Narrative Extraction from Social Media for Cultural Analytics" – see below]
Story Scrapers: How Algorithmic Systems Harvest and Reshape Narrative Data from Digital Traces
: Guidance on handling toxic behavior like badmouthing, and the importance of deep friendships over social media hashtags.