The lectures adress to students and geometers who are not experts in the field, but who need to use blowups occasionally or who just want to have a good comprehension of them. References are scattered in the literature and mostly concentrate on only part of the story. This text is neither complete, but hints at least at the variety of properties, results and techniques which are related to blow...

This paper presents experiments with the evaluation of automatically produced summaries of literary short stories. The summaries are tailored to a particular purpose of helping a reader decide whether she wants to read the story. The evaluation procedure includes extrinsic and intrinsic measures, as well as subjective and factual judgments about the summaries pronounced by human subjects. The e...

This paper describes a system that produces extractive summaries of short works of literary fiction. The ultimate purpose of produced summaries is defined as helping a reader to determine whether she would be interested in reading a particular story. To this end, the summary aims to provide a reader with an idea about the settings of a story (such as characters, time and place) without revealin...

Morals play an important role in why storytelling developed, and help provide stories with structure. We describe a storytelling system which generates short stories that convey one of six common morals identified in Aesop’s fables. Morals are represented in terms of patterns of character emotions that arise during the course of a story. To evaluate the system’s effectiveness, we compare system...