Interactive Fiction in the Humanities Classroom: How to Create Interactive Text Games Using Twine

This lesson provides strategies for incorporating game creation into the classroom. The first half of the lesson discusses the challenges and benefits of teaching game creation while the second half includes a technical tutorial for Twine, an open source game creation tool.

THE ROLE OF THE INTERACTIVE NOVEL IN MAKING THE DISCOURSE ON TOURISM

Travel literature is one of the narratives that the Arabs knew in the past, as it is a historical, geographic and visionary representation of others. The trip works on education. This is what the interactive text Ibn Battuta’s Journey to Dubai Al-Mahrousa by Muhammad Snagleh evokes in intertextuality with Ibn Battuta’s Journey, a Masterpiece of Overseers in the Oddities of the Regions and the Wonders of Travel by Ibn Battuta. If the latter travelled around the countries, the interactive text goes towards anticipating the future time in 2051, to read about the economic and political aspects in Dubai only. This research paper seeks to present a reading that combines the aesthetics of the interactive text with the tourist discourse. To what extent does interactive creativity contribute to the development of tourism? What are the possibilities offered by the blue screen for developing ancient narratives according to a modernist perspective? As for the curriculum, it is the systemic approach and interactive criticism. As so, the research is divided into two sections: 1 - The journey from paper to digital: Snagleh’s digital text consists of three units: the body text and its hyperlinks of a video, including images and sounds, and a pure interactive text for the reader's creativity and interactive participation in a two-track virtual journey. These are either directed to Ibn Battuta himself as a story and paper character, or send to the author of flesh and blood (i.e: Snagleh), editing the experience of the trip to Dubai or writing a comment or opinion. This is one of the suggested images of the interaction between the recipient and the text. 2. The Unsaid in the Discourse on Tourism: Snagleh diversified between spaces by highlighting its merits, and facilitating the means of transportation by air, sea and land. These options increase the persuasive power, and although Dubai is the glass civilization, Snagleh dazzles by showing the cultural coexistence between nationalities. However, he did not realize the overwhelming foreign presence among the natives. Thus, Snagleh’s novel can be counted as a cultural text, the implications of which can be read. Snagleh didn’t use Ibn Battuta as a paper figure as in Barthes’ terms, but as a sufficience. It is a strategic tourist guide, promoting Gulf tourism in Dubai by attracting the recipient with paintings and icons. Hence, literature is no longer a marginal product, but rather an economic industry that moves the wheel of sustainable development and increases its civilization incomes.

Nudge me: tailoring text messages for prescription adherence through N-of-1 interviews

Almost 50% of patients with cardiovascular diseases face challenges in taking medications and increased morbidity and mortality. Text messaging may impact medication refill behavior and can be delivered at scale to patients by texting mobile phones. To obtain feedback from persons with chronic conditions on the design of interactive text messages and determine language of message for making messages that can motivate patients to refill medications on time. We purposively sampled 35 English and Spanish speaking patients with at least one chronic condition from three large healthcare delivery systems to participate in N-of-1 video-based synchronous interviews. Research assistants shared ideas for theory-informed text messages with content intended to persuade patients to refill their medication. We transcribed recorded interviews and conducted a content analysis to identify strategies to employ generating a dynamic interactive text message library intended to increase medication refill. Those interviewed were of diverse age and race/ethnicity and typical of persons with multiple chronic conditions. Several participants emphasized that personally tailored and positively framed messages would be more persuasive than generic and/or negative messages. Some patients appreciated humor and messages that could evoke a sense of social support from their providers and rejected the use of emojis. Messages to remind patients to refill medications may facilitate improvements in adherence, which in turn can improve chronic care. Designing messages that are persuasive and can prompt action is feasible and should be considered given the ease with which such messages can be delivered automatically at scale.

A feasibility trial of parent HPV vaccine reminders and phone-based motivational interviewing

Background We assessed the feasibility and acceptability of a sequential approach of parent-targeted HPV vaccine reminders and phone-based Motivation Interviewing (MI). Methods In 2016, we selected all 11- to 12-year-old boys and girls seen in one clinic whose vaccine records did not include the HPV vaccine (n=286). By gender, we individually randomized parents of adolescents to an interactive text message (74 girls and 45 boys), postcard reminder (46 boys and no girls because of previously demonstrated efficacy), or standard care group (75 girls and 46 boys). Reminders were sent with medical director permission and a HIPAA waiver. Two months after reminders, among the adolescents whose vaccine records still did not include the HPV vaccine, we selected a gender-stratified random sample of 20 parents for phone-based MI. We assessed the percentage of deliverable messages, the percentage of parents’ responding to the interactive text message, parent acceptability of receiving a text message, and MI parent responsiveness and interviewer competence (MI Treatment Integrity Coding system). Results Nearly all messages were deliverable (98% of postcards and 74% of text messages). Six of the 88 parents (7%) receiving text messages scheduled an appointment through our interactive system. The acceptability survey response rate was 37% (38/102). Respondents were favorable toward vaccine reminders for all parents (82%). Among 20 sampled parents, 17 were reached by phone of whom 7 completed MI, 4 had or were getting the HPV vaccine for their child, and 5 expressed disinterest. Across the 7 MI calls, the interviewer was rated 100% MI adherent and scored an average 4.19 rating for Global Spirit. Conclusion Without providing explicit consent to receive vaccine-related messages, parents nonetheless found postcards and interactive text messages acceptable. Centralizing MI to phone calls with trained staff was acceptable to parents and resulted in highly MI-adherent interviews.

An Interactive Text Message Survey as a Novel Assessment for Bedtime Routines in Public Health Research: Observational Study

Background Traditional research approaches, especially questionnaires and paper-based assessments, limit in-depth understanding of the fluid dynamic processes associated with child well-being and development. This includes bedtime routine activities such as toothbrushing and reading a book before bed. The increase in innovative digital technologies alongside greater use and familiarity among the public creates unique opportunities to use these technical developments in research. Objective This study aimed to (1) examine the best way of assessing bedtime routines in families and develop an automated, interactive, text message survey assessment delivered directly to participants’ mobile phones and (2) test the assessment within a predominately deprived sociodemographic sample to explore retention, uptake, feedback, and effectiveness. Methods A public and patient involvement project showed clear preference for interactive text surveys regarding bedtime routines. The developed interactive text survey included questions on bedtime routine activities and was delivered for seven consecutive nights to participating parents’ mobile phones. A total of 200 parents participated. Apart from the completion of the text survey, feedback was provided by participants, and data on response, completion, and retention rates were captured. Results There was a high retention rate (185/200, 92.5%), and the response rate was high (160/185, 86.5%). In total, 114 participants provided anonymized feedback. Only a small percentage (5/114, 4.4%) of participants reported problems associated with completing the assessment. The majority (99/114, 86.8%) of participants enjoyed their participation in the study, with an average satisfaction score of 4.6 out of 5. Conclusions This study demonstrated the potential of deploying SMS text message–based surveys to capture and quantify real-time information on recurrent dynamic processes in public health research. Changes and adaptations based on recommendations are crucial next steps in further exploring the diagnostic and potential intervention properties of text survey and text messaging approaches.

Interactive Text Ranking with Bayesian Optimization: A Case Study on Community QA and Summarization

For many NLP applications, such as question answering and summarization, the goal is to select the best solution from a large space of candidates to meet a particular user’s needs. To address the lack of user or task-specific training data, we propose an interactive text ranking approach that actively selects pairs of candidates, from which the user selects the best. Unlike previous strategies, which attempt to learn a ranking across the whole candidate space, our method uses Bayesian optimization to focus the user’s labeling effort on high quality candidates and integrate prior knowledge to cope better with small data scenarios. We apply our method to community question answering (cQA) and extractive multidocument summarization, finding that it significantly outperforms existing interactive approaches. We also show that the ranking function learned by our method is an effective reward function for reinforcement learning, which improves the state of the art for interactive summarization.