People share stories online for a myriad of purposes, whether as a means of self-disclosure, processing difficult personal experiences, providing needed information or entertainment, or persuading others to share their beliefs. Better understanding of online storytelling can illuminate the dynamics of social movements, sensemaking practices, persuasion strategies, and more. However, unlike other media such as books and visual content where the narrative nature of the content is often overtly signaled at the document level, studying storytelling in online communities is challenging due to the mixture of storytelling and non-storytelling behavior, which can be interspersed within documents and across diverse topics and settings. We introduce a codebook and create the Storytelling in Online Communities Corpus, an expert-annotated dataset of 502 English-language posts and comments with labeled story and event spans. Using our corpus, we train and evaluate an online story detection model, which we use to investigate the role storytelling of in different social contexts. We identify distinctive features of online storytelling, the prevalence of storytelling among different communities, and the conversational patterns of storytelling.

翻译：人们出于多种目的在线分享故事，无论是作为自我表露、处理艰难的个人经历、提供所需信息或娱乐，还是说服他人认同自己的信念。更好地理解在线叙事可以揭示社会运动的动态、意义建构实践、说服策略等。然而，与书籍和视觉内容等其他媒介不同——在这些媒介中，内容的叙事性质通常在文档层面有明确标示——由于叙事行为与非叙事行为混杂在一起，且可能穿插在文档中并跨越不同主题和场景，研究在线社区中的叙事具有挑战性。我们引入了一套编码手册，并创建了“在线社区叙事语料库”，这是一个由502篇英文帖子及评论组成的专家标注数据集，其中标注了故事和事件范围。利用该语料库，我们训练并评估了一个在线故事检测模型，并用它来研究叙事在不同社交背景中的作用。我们识别了在线叙事的独特特征、不同社区中叙事的普遍性，以及叙事的对话模式。