Acknowledgments
Curveship originated when I was working on my dissertation at the University of Pennsylvania with the help and support of my advisors, Mitch Marcus and Gerald Prince, and my committee members, Aravind Joshi, Mark Liberman, Fernando Pereira, and Marie-Laure Ryan. I continued to develop the system that was called “nn” in my dissertation and in some articles and books under its new name, “Curveship.”
Almost a decade before I started programming the system, I began reading about narratology and considering its application in computing as I was working on my masters at MIT under the supervision of my advisor, Justine Cassell, and Glorianna Davenport and Janet Murray.
In my early years on the MIT faculty, the Institute’s School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences supported the development of Curveship along with other academic work of mine by allowing me to focus on my research during my Junior Faculty Research Leave and Old Dominion Leave.
Discussions with and encouragement from members of the interactive fiction community have been invaluable, both those I’ve had online, on ifMUD, and the ones that happened in person during meetings of the People’s Republic of Interactive Fiction.
I’m grateful that Rafael Pérez y Pérez collaborated with me on a Curveship project and that Pablo Gervás, Inderjeet Mani, and Noah Wardrip-Fruin have written about the system in books and articles. Since my initial collaboration with Rafael Pérez y Pérez, he and I have done another collaboration with Fox Harrell and Andrew Campana.
I also thank those who invited me to speak about the system prior to release at the UC Santa Cruz EIS Lab, the Tufts Department of Computer Science, the Workshop on Situated Understanding of Intention at Penn, the NAACL HLT Workshop on Computational Approaches to Linguistic Creativity, the MIT Hyperstudio, and the University of Florida Conference on Games and Digital Media. Thanks also to the Electronic Literature Organization and HASTAC, whose conferences included presentations of mine about Curveship, and to two AAAI events where I presented about the system, the Intelligent Narrative Technologies symposium and the Computational Aesthetics workshops. Norman Ramsey, in addition to inviting me to present at a colloquium at Tufts, also hosted an extremely useful day-long discussion of the system there, in which Eddie Aftandilian and Brad Larsen also participated.
After October, 2009, pre-release versions of the Curveship-py system have been provided to a group of researchers, IF authors, and programmers; I appreciate that several have helped me as I have developed the system since then, including Malcolm Ryan and Max Battcher. On November 7, 2010 I hosted a Curveship Codefest (for Curveship-py) at MIT at the suggestion of Fox Harrell. My thanks to the attendees: Amaranth Borsuk, Andrew Plotkin, Angela Chang, Brad Bouse, Doug Orleans, Jake Eakle, Jason McIntosh, Kevin Jackson-Mead, Luis Blackaller, Flourish Klink, Fox Harrell, and Ralph Lombreglia.
Curveship-js originated in the late 2010s and was first made available to my Fall 2019 Interactive Narrative class at MIT. Not only is it intended as a partial implementation of Curveship-py, but what has been developed so far only implements a small subset of what I would like for the system to do. It has not been at all extensively tested, but I appreciate Judy Heflin and Milton Läufer having taken time to look over my work so far.