Conceptual Software Engineering Applied to Movie Scripts and Stories

Abstract

According to researchers, a large proportion of research software (software on which researchers rely) is fragile and the source of numerous problems that plague computational science. This study introduces another application of software engineering tools, conceptual modeling, which can be applied to other fields of research. One way to strengthen the relationship between software engineering and other fields is to develop a good way to perform conceptual modeling that is capable of addressing the peculiarities of these fields of study. This study concentrates on humanities and social sciences, which are usually considered “softer” and further away from abstractions and (abstract) machines. Specifically, we focus on conceptual modeling as a software engineering tool (e.g., UML) in the area of stories and movie scripts. Researchers in the humanities and social sciences might not use the same degree of formalization that engineers do, but they still find conceptual modeling useful. Current modeling techniques (e.g., UML) fail in this task because they are geared toward the creation of software systems. Similar Conceptual Modeling Language (e.g., ConML) has been proposed with the humanities and social sciences in mind and, as claimed, can be used to model “anything.” This study is a venture in this direction, where a software modeling technique, Thinging Machine (TM), is applied to movie scripts and stories. The paper presents a novel approach to developing diagrammatic static/dynamic models of movie scripts and stories. The TM model diagram serves as a neutral and independent representation for narrative discourse and can be used as a communication instrument among participants. It is based on the notion of thing/machine (or thimac). Things and events are defined as what can be created, released, transferred, received, accepted and processed. Machines are what create, process, release, transfer and receive things. The examples presented include examples from Propp’s model of fairytales; the railway children and an actual movie script seem to point to the viability of the approach