Developing a recommender mechanism for supporting mobile content reuse

Nowadays people got used to short text answers, likes and shares. Anyone can feel it by entering popular forums or social networks. Modern platforms such as Twitter or Facebook contribute to this situation with their symbols per message limitations. The quality of content produced in such conditions is not high. According to Knight and Burn (2005): “The rapid growth of the Internet and the lack of enforceable standards regarding the information it contains has led to numerous information quality problems.” The possible solution to this problem is called mobile digital storytelling. It replaces traditional communication mechanisms (text, photos) with a digital narrative, thus making a stronger impact on user. Besides, it allows creating interesting content at any location with the help of mobile phone. However, it is hard to make a high quality story from scratch without prior experience. Viewing through previously created high quality content provides such experience. At the same time, reusing this content would allow creating story by combining and rearranging instead of producing from scratch. But state of the art mobile digital storytelling applications don’t provide any possibilities for content reuse. In addition, the influence of content reuse on the story creation process was not studied. Hence, in this work the researcher will explore and try to develop alternative ways to support content reuse in mobile digital storytelling (mDS). For this purpose a mechanism called RecSM (a recommendation system using content from Social Media) is introduced. The main goal of development is to create RecSM for mobile digital storytelling application. The influence of RecSM on mobile content reuse as well as the influence of reuse on storytelling process is the main study goals. The thesis is based on research conducted in Linnaeus University, Sweden. The research is divided into two main parts: gathering requirements for RecSM and the case study. 10 users are involved in both activities. Initial requirements for RecSM are defined after conducting research in the topic but final requirements are determined with the help of users. Based on them the RecSM is developed and added to a mobile digital storytelling application. A case study in Teleborg Castle (Vaxjo, Sweden) follows afterwards. Participants create stories about their castle experience with the help of mDS or mDS-RecSM application. The data for further research is retrieved through field notes, personal interviews and a survey. Then stories and answers of people that used mDS with and without recommender are compared and analyzed. Based on the study outcomes it is concluded that developed RecSM supports content reuse in mobile digital storytelling.