Click a colored lens to select it, then move the mouse over highlights to see annotations.

Since stories contain so much implicit reference to shared and understood information, perhaps the best way to organize stories is by making some of this shared information explicit in the form of meta-data. You can then organize stories not only on their content but also on the meta-data. This prototype (using one of Aesop's fables) gives a simple example of what some story meta-data might look like. The lens metaphor allows us to look at the story through colored glasses -- through character-colored glasses, through plot-colored glasses, and so on. You can imagine many dimensions of meta-data in addition to those shown here.

You can also imagine tools that might help in creating and organizing the meta-data, tools that could automate some aspects of doing this (through text mining), and tools that could help you to browse and search through stories based on the meta-data.