Terminal Time: An Ideologically-biased History Machine

Terminal Time is a machine that constructs ideologically-biased documentary histories in response to audience feedback. The audience answers multiple-choice questions via an applause meter. The answers to these questions influence which historical events are chosen from a knowledge base, how these events will be slanted to embody the bias implied in the audience's answers, and how the events will be connected together to form a historical narrative. Once the narrative has been generated, video and sound clips are selected from a term-indexed multimedia database. The resulting documentary, consisting of the newly generated narrative spoken by a speech synthesizer, and the video and sound clips, is then presented to the audience.