Good luck, onward and upward, etc. etc… and don’t forget when the nights get long that you have future readers excited to see it when it is done.

Fox, I do hope that the specific question I’m investigating in an IF framework is one of more general interest. That question – how can a computer automatically narrate underlying events in different ways? – seems quite relevant to all sorts of other systems: mobile robots that model what they’ve done and seen (and that need to relate these things to people), training exercises done in simulation, sports commentary, customized and contextualized news stories, reporting on network activity, and so on. I am particularly interested in IF, but also in other literary and aesthetic systems: story generators, narrative poetry generators, virtual environments and interactive dramas in which non-player characters might want to tell stories. Generalizing the Narrator module of my system won’t be part of my dissertation work, but I’m certainly hoping that it tells us something general to narrative and is useful in other contexts.

Best wishes, I look forward to exciting developments.