Authoring Processes

Authors aim to convey some ideas or new meanings to their audience (Sharda, 2004a). All authoring systems require a process that the author needs to follow, to effectively convey their ideas to the consumers of the content. Novels, movies, plays are all ‘Cultural Interfaces’ that try to tell a story (Manovich, 2001). Models of processes for creating good stories have been articulated for thousands of years. Nonetheless, some scholars stand out, such as Aristotle, who over 2300 years ago wrote Poetics, a seminal work on authoring (Aristotle, 1996). Robert McKee details story authoring processes as applied to screenplay writing (McKee, 1998). Michael Tierno shows how Aristotle’s ideas for writing tragedies can be applied to creating good screenplays (Tierno, 2002). Dramatica is a new theory of authoring, based on the problem solving metaphor (Phillips and Huntley, 2001).

Processes involved in creating a meaningful digital multimedia presentation have evolved from the processes used in other media authoring systems; and some of these are used as metaphors for underpinning the process of creating multimedia. For example, PowerPoint uses the slideshow metaphor, as it relates to lecture presentations based on the (optical) slide projector. Multimedia authoring is one of the most complex authoring processes, and to some extent not as well grounded as those for the more traditional media (England, 1999). The following sections present two authoring models developed for supporting the process of authoring multimedia systems (Sharda, 2004 b, c).