A Systematic Literature Review of Online Collaborative Story Writing

Collaboratively writing a narrative is a challenging task. Further complications emerge when the involved contributors do not know each other, as it commonly occurs in online crowdsourcing. The paper presents a systematic literature review of online collaborative story writing with the aim of analysing what are the different forms of user involvement in such approaches and systems. To this end, we propose a reference definition based on essential features that characterise online collaborative story writing and we follow an exploratory approach based on a two-step method characterised by i) identification and selection of relevant publications, and ii) analysis of the selected literature. For the analysis, we consider relevant dimensions from the Taxonomy of Collaborative Writing [30] and we compare approaches according to modes of work, writing roles, and writing activities. As a summary of our results, about the modes of work, we focused on synchronicity and we observed that synchronous communications are mostly adopted by dialogue-based approaches, whereas asynchronous communications frequently characterise scene-based ones. On the writing roles, writer, consultant, and reviewer are commonly included in the writing process of the reviewed approaches. Furthermore, the roles of editor and leader are sometimes employed, while the facilitator role never appears in the considered approaches. As for the activities, collaborators are mostly involved in drafting tasks, but the tasks of brainstorming, reviewing, and revising are very common as well. On the opposite, activities like converging, outlining, and copyediting are rarely employed. In line with the results of our review, we propose four further research directions to study: collaborator recruitment, collaborator awareness, creative guidance, and modalities of contribution. This review should be helpful for researchers and practitioners interested in engaging contributors in effective online col- laborative story writing.