narratology – Simon.BuckinghamShum.net

Teachers’ Change Stories & Storybases

Visiting University of Kent at Canterbury this week, I met Sally Fincher. She is running an intruiging project called Change Stories, a narrative approach to eliciting accounts of educational practitioner learning:

“Our Question

When do you make changes to your teaching?

What gives you the idea?

What do you do then?

Our Idea: We aim to gather hundreds of real examples of how and when and why educators change their practice.”

This is a project as part of her work on a Cognitive Edge course, arising from the work that Dave Snowden has been developing over the last decade, on the application of complexity theory to sensemaking. The narrative database you’re taken to provides an engaging user interface which uses graphical slides and triangles to provide an expressive medium:

Cognitive Edge: story database screen1

Cognitive Edge: story database screen2

Cognitive Edge: story database screen3

If this is of interest then check out Joanna Kwiat’s Storymaking Project [blog], who reviewed narrative theory with respect to narrative technology development, designed a story annotation scheme, and evaluated its use via a prototype storybase.

Narrative annotation scheme: design rationale & evaluation

Last year PhD student Joanna Kwiat released the detailed literature review from her Storymaking Project as a self-contained KMi Technical Report: “From Aristotle to Gabriel: A Summary of the Narratology Literature for Story Technologies.”

This inspired the design and detailed evaluation of a prototype “storybase” (story database) for healthcare professionals to share their knowledge and experiences as annotatable stories. The advance that this work makes is to go beyond tagging, by using an annotation scheme grounded in narrative theory, in which peers declare the different “points” of the story as they see them, plus other optional facets such as the protagonist, antagonist, genre of story, etc.

I’m delighted to say that the full report of this work is now published as her dissertation:

Kwiat, J. (2009). Multi-Perspective Annotation of Digital Stories for Professional Knowledge Sharing within Health Care. Doctoral Dissertation, available as: Technical Report KMI-09-02, Knowledge Media Institute, The Open University, UK. http://kmi.open.ac.uk/publications/pdf/kmi-09-02.pdf

Abstract

[We] dream in narrative, daydream in narrative, remember, anticipate, hope, despair, believe, doubt, plan, revise, criticize, construct, gossip, learn, hate, and love by narrative. Barbara Hardy, 1977.

This thesis investigates the potential of narrative theory to inform the design of tools for sharing and annotating stories, in the context of professional knowledge sharing. We begin with a detailed review of the literature on modelling narrative, to establish the theoretical foundations for a narratologically-grounded annotation schema. Medicine is then selected for a tri-part study, since narrative-based approaches in healthcare education and practice are seen by many as significant.

The first part seeks evidence of narrative among medical professionals communicating spontaneously and informally online. The frequency and range of stories identified shows that this appears to be a common and valued mode of communication.

The second part envisions a Web story database (“storybase”) supporting flexible annotation grounded in a narratological metadata scheme. The model draws on various narrative structure theories, and in particular, point-structure. A story can be annotated via a graphical user interface on various dimensions, enabling multiple interpretations.

The third part analyses users annotating representative samples of the stories abstracted from the corpus in part 1. Data is analysed quantitatively (annotation value clustering, questionnaire responses and task phase durations) coupled with a qualitative account of participant behaviour based on grounded theory video analysis. While this study has limitations, it validates both the expressiveness and usability of the story annotation schema, and shows that participants found the experience to be enjoyable and stimulating. Interaction analysis demonstrates the centrality of interface design in shaping annotation behaviour. This work motivates further storybase research, informing the design of future studies and storybase technologies.

An additional report provides data and analysis appendices:

Kwiat, J. (2009). Multi-Perspective Annotation of Digital Stories for Professional Knowledge Sharing within Health Care: Appendices. Technical Report KMI-09-03, Knowledge Media Institute, The Open University, UK. http://kmi.open.ac.uk/publications/pdf/kmi-09-03.pdf

Very well done Joanna! A significant piece of work in an emerging field at the intersection of narrative and digital media, tuned to support collective sensemaking in a way that engages both head and heart.

From Aristotle to Gabriel: Narratology for Story Technologists

Just published is this report from the Storymaking Project by KMi student Joanna Kwiat:

Kwiat, J. (2008). From Aristotle to Gabriel: A Summary of the Narratology Literature for Story Technologies. Technical Report KMI-08-01, Knowledge Media Institute, The Open University, UK. Available at: http://kmi.open.ac.uk/publications/pdf/kmi-08-01.pdf

Anyone working on story technologies or annotation will find this of interest. Details below.

Abstract:

This purpose of this report is to provide a practical guide for story technologists. The report is organised in two parts. In the first part we explore, more or less chronologically, past and contemporary story models and in the second part we look at more recent theories and implementations examined in a story-making context.

In recent years there has been resurgence of interest in the both the medium and message of the story. However, we shall confine our discussion to structural theories and models because we assume firstly, that the main concerns for the story technologist are: story generation, annotation and organisation; secondly, we also want to offer the interested reader, a basic introduction to the still emerging discipline of narratology.

One reason for concentrating in Part 1 on past and contemporary story models is that it provides us with a vocabulary just in order to discuss this most familiar form of human communication; secondly it will help us identify whether and how originating theories have influenced those that are more applied which we shall discuss in Part 2.

In order to confine the search, we tend in Part 1 to disregard more abstract models and to concentrate solely on originating theories but which are described in concrete structural terms. Thus we are able to identify three broad research domains: literature, culture and cognition, each of which can be subdivided into three phases of development. Starting with the Aristotelian argument that the story to be appreciated as such, must meet certain structural criteria we follow an almost inevitable path from what we call the grammatical models to a period when the story was regarded as having a structure that could be paralleled to the linguistic structure of the sentence and, moreover, could be generated from a similar rule set. A powerful counter argument was that perfect syntax does not guarantee a story product and that matters of discourse are just as important to consider. Beyond the story grammars, there is a very active period and a diversity of theories but one thing most of them have in common is that the plot, no longer regarded as paramount, gives way to such things as narrator motive and audience response. We have in our own research used these more sophisticated models to identify and lift out stories from general online discussion threads; in addition they are informing our design and development of markup schemas for digital storybases.

Whereas Part 1 follows the rise and development of narratology, Part 2 brings our review of the literature up-to-date. Here, however, we are less concerned with the origin of ideas and more concerned with how they have informed contemporary applications. The concept of story-making offered by Harvey and Martin (1995) allows us to examine these later models from four perspectives: construction, recall, understanding and telling. We use these four perspectives as a basis for making judgements about which models are principally oriented towards, address or succeed in each of these areas.

CONTACT: Jkwiat {at} northamptonshire.gov.uk