  People from all over the world use social media to share thoughts and
opinions about events, and understanding what people say through these channels
has been of increasing interest to researchers, journalists, and marketers
alike. However, while automatically generated summaries enable people to
consume large amounts of data efficiently, they do not provide the context
needed for a viewer to fully understand an event. Narrative structure can
provide templates for the order and manner in which this data is presented to
create stories that are oriented around narrative elements rather than
summaries made up of facts. In this paper, we use narrative theory as a
framework for identifying the links between social media content. To do this,
we designed crowdsourcing tasks to generate summaries of events based on
commonly used narrative templates. In a controlled study, for certain types of
events, people were more emotionally engaged with stories created with
narrative structure and were also more likely to recommend them to others
compared to summaries created without narrative structure.
