3.5 Creating story scenarios from the LDA topics
While the creation of each of the ten stories was inherently unique, we nonetheless detail the process for one of the stories (Topic #5, “Concession 60”) to illustrate what the structured futuring process looks like in practice (Fig 3). The full creative processes for all the stories are documented in the Supplement. While the LDA objectively revealed the keywords for this approach, every other step was a structured, imaginative endeavor. As such, a very large number of stories could conceivably emerge from the starting point of the topic model. However, a key goal of this method is to maintain fidelity in the eventual story concepts and ideas to the original LDA topic context and keywords (Steps 1 and 2).
While each step is described in the Methods section of this text, we examine here the step-by-step approach displayed in Fig 3, corresponding to the steps for constructing the story for Topic #5, entitled ‘Concession 60’:
  1. For Topic #5, the two-quadrant context was expected climate change and low cooperation .
  2. The keywords for Topic #5 were clustered around the concepts of ‘industrial development’, ‘finance’, ‘extraction’, and ‘agreements’.
  3. Based on these keywords, the core topic was labeled ‘Extractive, industrial Arctic’.
  4. Next, using Futures Wheels we brainstormed interconnections that might emerge in the future among these keywords in Topic #5, in the context of the labeled quadrants.
  5. Then, we used the ideas from Step 4 in a Three Horizons exercise and explored the changing paradigms that would wax and wane over time, leading to a future characterized as an ‘Extractive, industrial Arctic.’
  6. Next, we took our ideas and keywords from Steps 2-5, and reflected on the broader regional and global aspects of how the world in Topic #5 may interact with this idea of a future Arctic.
  7. In ‘pushing toward ridiculousness’ and given the topic of extraction and industrialization in the Arctic, we considered what aspects of society, economy, and technology could be dramatically different from the present. In this way, we explored ideas of labor, drone monitoring, and nano-mining that are, at present, not socially, economically, or technologically in existence.
  8. Equipped with a mature setting in which a story might unfold, we develop a character named Misha Park , a climate migrant from the United States who had migrated north, to an undisclosed Arctic location.
  9. Based on the extractive, industrial Arctic and the climate migrant, Misha, we developed a plot that explored how a climate migrant might be entrapped in exploitative labor practices to sate ongoing global demand for rare earth metals.
  10. Using the story beats method, we identified the major turning points of the narrative for the character, focusing on a day in the life of an indentured laborer in future rare earth mining operations, who also suffers from the trauma that she experienced as a climate migrant.
  11. Using all this preparatory work, the story was drafted around each story beat, ensuring that Misha had a satisfying character arc, and that the story adequately explored the future world of an extractive, industrial Arctic.
  12. Qualitative review was employed to check whether the eventual story could reflect back to the original keywords from the LDA, with prominent themes in the story related to ‘infrastructure’, ‘investment’, ‘mining’, ‘resource’, and ‘production’.