Eventyr

Storytelling as Role Modeling: Collecting Oral Histories

I had been awaiting this one session ever since the programme was first published.  Happily I was not disappointed.

Barbara Boucher Owens (Southwestern University), Vicki L. Almstrum (The University of Texas at Austin), Lecia J. Barker (ATLAS Assessment and Research Center), and E. Anne Gates Applin (Ithaca College) spoke about their in-progress work with the Computing Educators Oral History Project (CEOHP).

The rationale for the project is to collect narratives and oral histories from women educators in computing, to provide the basis for exploring how they could be used to support mentoring. We were introduced to the project, some sample interviews and looked at their early stage indexing system. 

What interested me was the similarities in the issues they were addressing with our own on the (slightly less ambitious) Agile Narratives Project.  Their talk gave me plenty to think about and implement, further references for reading, and the potential promise of a support network for people working in this field in the future.  This connection alone would have made the entire conference invaluable for me.   I left with a spring in my step, and a gladness in my heart, knowing that I was not alone and had just met some lovely people who were working in the same area.

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Johanna Hunt
Official GHC 2007 Blogger
You may comment on this blog by visiting the GHC Forum

The Narrative Practitioner

I wasn’t sure what to expect when I found I was presenting at the Narrative Practitioner conference in Wrexham in Wales.  It turned out to be a very enjoyable and interesting experience, with an impressive number and mix of keynote speakers.

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Day One:

By the time I had conquered the long drive up from Brighton, and navigated the Wrexham roads, I found myself sadly late for Donald Polkinghorne’s keynote talk ‘The narrativity of practice’.  What little I did catch was interesting and more than set the tone for the rest of the conference. 

Notes:

• If only the observable is real, we should talk about humans as we talk about objects.  Things are lost if we do this.
• Being human is temporal, we have a beginning, middle and end.
• Ricoeur, humans as actors
• Story helps us to understand and inform our next actions.
• There is something expressed in narrative about being human which is not expressed elsewhere.
• Pragmatism – Doing things moving through life as actors/practitioners
• Goals are contextualised  - not just out there
• Practice goals: ethical, life, means, conflicts
• Retrospective narratives: novice -> expert
• Can be used to invent prospective narratives

I generated a list of types of stories, which I shall have to revisit and revise in future:

• Retrospective stories
• Research articles
• Past experiences
• Oral tradition
• Prospective stories
• Designs (proposals and ‘method sections’)
• Qualitative + Quantitative designs
• Personal stories
• Vicarious (Oral, colleagues, research)
• Authorities (government, empirically based practice)
• Schonn’s thinking in action / walkthroughs

This keynote was followed by another keynote from Didier Danthois (School of Sacred Clowning) with a performance entitled ‘The wisdom of innocence’.  I twittered about how there was a clown on the lecturn, there really was.  After his performance he spoke about how the unknown leads to fear, so we need to learn to play instead.  He felt sad that you leave innocence behind as you grow up.

The afternoon sessions were all interesting, but my notes are sparse so apologies for omissions or inaccuracies. 

Narratives of Action Research (Melissa Sevista Nolas):

• Action research is a relational methodology
• Gergen 1997, Bowen 1998, Jovchelovitch 2007
• Working with groups, communities and organisations
• Dialogue (Levin 1946, 1958, Freire 1970)
• However, little research on action research.
• Bowen 1998 – Context in action research is emergent
• Roth 2006 – Action research methodology books should come with warning stickers
• Ways to learn:
• Didactic model – inadequate
• Apprenticeship model – Determined by opportunity
• Stories – Sharing experiences of Action Research projects
• Shareable world (Kearney 2002:3)
• Riessman Organising Experience
• Schonn Reflecting on Practice
• Polkinghorne (1998) Practitioners work with narrative knowledge
• Rappaport (1995) Narrative as a resource
• Stories were supportive in terms of sensemaking, identity, construction and communication
• Support roles and retelling to elicit responses
• Can methodological narratives still be considered stories?
• Are they asking for more stories or just different types?
• Making scientific research messy.
• Does technical rationality exclude storytelling?
• People who work in industry are doing action research.

Taking Risks: an exploration into women’s perceptions of ante natal risk in pregnancy’ (Dawn Jones):

• Beck 2004:203
• Late modernity
• Scientific narratives – rational response to problem solving
• Ontological security
• Now we have a need to know the risk.
• Risks are socially constructed sources of danger, are ‘knowledge’ and not ‘ignorance’
• Overt vs. Covert research

I ended the day with a clear task for myself: distinguish discourse, story and narrative in my research and make sure I keep to the distinction.

The day concluded with  exemplary music from Liam Robinson and Thomas Fairbairn and dancing at the conference dinner.

I then had to face the horror which was the student halls, but the less said about them the better.

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Day Two:

The morning keynote was from Roshan Doug who spoke on ‘The business of poetry’.  Some interesting points I noted:

• As researchers we are Faust.
• If we look to Milton – we are all Satan, we all want to set up on our own
• The purpose of a poet is to defamiliarise our familiarity
• Hermes leads to hermeneutic
• James Gee
• Kirkegaard – Lived forwards and understood backwards

The following session I presented, so I have no notes from the other talks as I was immersed in re-reading my own slides.    I know I came away convinced I need to look further into space and the narratives of objects: space of bodies, space of objects.

The afternoon keynote was from Gavin J. Fairbairn (I never asked whether he was related to the previous evening’s entertainment) on ‘Storytelling, Ethics and Academic Writing’. 

Rough notes:

• Real – Biographic Experience <-case studies
• Vs
• True – True to life (not ncy factual)
• Scientific labelling for remoteness
• Storytelling for closeness and empathy
• Hypothetical stories are the moral philosophers tool
• Weingartner – ‘Teaching as a subversive activity’
• Crap detecting, learning value or lack of
• Researchers should write so that as many people as possible are able to understand their work.
• Clarity of writing
• Tools for Obfuscation
• Big words
• Difficult ones
• No explanation
• Jargon (best from other fields)
• Liberal use of citation
• Obscure citation better
• Always cite the greats (name drop, esp. philosophers and social scientists)
• More refs mean more ‘academic’
• Circular arguments
• Difficult prose
• Ask yourself:
• Is this clear?
• Is this free from jargon?
• Is the structure helpful?
• Are the citations needed?
• Academic writing should be like storytelling
• They should tell their tales and make their research into a narrative

In the afternoon I chose to attend a workshop by Robin Williamson (who also provided the evening entertainment over dinner).  This was followed by a small student dramatisation of a teaching play for encouraging discussions about the difficulties faced by new students. 

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Day Three:

The final day was short but no less interesting.

Dr Alex Carson gave a fascinating keynote talk entitled ‘The Narrative Practitioner’.  Again my notes are rough, but I think they serve my purpose:

• “man is in his actions and practice, as well as in his fictions, essentially a storytelling animal”   1985:216
• Narratives are the practice not measurable against the practice
• Polkinghorne 1988:13: organisational scheme expressed in story form.
• Intelligibility
• Form of life
• Shared culture, understanding, social bonding
• Develops our tradition
• Max Weber
• Disenchantment of the world after the enlightenment
• Subject vs object divide
• Assumption that our ordinary perceptions are faulty
• Thick description, Geertz
• Fundamentally, the researcher makes the choices.  You can’t hide behind approach.  Research is value-laden and unbiased.
• The concepts of quantitative and qualitative research are just grand narratives (a la Foucault).  They structure your perceptions, don’t validate according to them.
• You should own up to reflexivity in research project
• Narrative Analysis:
  
  • “all practices aim at some good” (Aristotle)
  • Deconstruction
  • Critical Conversation
  • Reconstruction (stronger)
  • Holistic
  • Developmental
  • (Demosthenes “I suffered nothing”)
• Narrative Practitioner:
  
  • Fired with passion (Hegel)
  • Knows he/she doesn’t know
  • Open to further conversations
  • Reflective critical phenomenology
  • Says more about who we are, what we do (not reductionist)
  • Develops our self understanding
    

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All in all a very good conference, one I look forward to attending again despite the student halls.  Now I just need to write the associated paper.

The Story of Research

At the end of May I presented at a one-day symposium on reading and writing research at the Sussex Institute at the University of Sussex called ‘The Story of Research’. 

The first keynote ‘Representing Lived Experience: Making Principled Decisions’ by Professor Andrew Sparkes, was interesting and relieving in equal measure. 

The questions he posed which I particularly noted:

• How are you going to write it?
• How are you going to represent it?
• Be explicit about what you are doing and why!
  • Scientific / Realist / Confessional / Autoethnography / Poetic / Ethnodrama / Ethnographic fiction / Creative fiction/mixed genres
• How do you judge them?
• Narrative Poetry – Learning through the power of language
• Who do you want legitimacy from?
• (RAE as farce)
• Think about who we are when we are writing.

The talks were fun, although I regretted attending the second keynote as it resulted in an unfortunate coffee-spilling incident.   (Yes, I knocked it everywhere and over others.) 

Coding not Tagging

I had an interesting moment yesterday when starting to explain how coding* works in qualitative research.  I was thinking about the easiest way to explain it to a layperson and realised...

All it is is tagging. Standard web2 tagging.

Odd that I had never conceived of the two as linked before.  It is blindingly obvious.

I've been participating in the Tags Networks Narrative in my *cough* spare time so I've noticed it even more.  TNN is a "unique speculative project exploring the potential for collaborative keyword tagging (folksonomy) in narrative research."  It is looking at tagging as a form of communication, folksonomy as an emergent knowledge network and narrative as a common ground.

By happy coincidence I have been assigned to the 'blue group' - see more on the project weblog.

(I am curious to hear more about the findings from our 'adventures in tagging' at the project seminar in June.)

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* Not programming.

Narrative Research Course Ends - Ctn

Interesting news from my Narrative Research course leader - looks like two of the papers I wrote for the course could be reworked for publication. 

This would be fantastic, as I currently only have papers on ethnography and agile practice, but nothing on narrative research.

I may need to find the time to work on this as well.

My free time is drifting off into the sunset - blown away by interesting things.

Narrative Research Course Ends

On Wednesday I submitted* my final assignment for my Narrative Research PGCert - looking at small story research in narrative analysis.  It has the possibility of being my last assessed 'essay' ever - as my DPhil work only requires reports, articles and abstracts. 

So long taught courses, I suspect I shall secretly miss you.

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* Sadly it was not received by my tutor until much later as it appears the system at UEL blocks pdf files.  Grr.

Goffman's Distinction

Using Goffman’s (1981) distinction between the author (“someone who has selected the sentiments that are being expressed and the words in which they are encoded” – p. 144), the animator (“the talking machine, the thing that sounds comes out of” – p. 167), and the principal (“someone who believes personally in what is being said and takes the position that is implied in the remarks” – p. 167), this small story is particularly interesting.

From: 'Small Stories' as a new perspective in narrative and identity analysis by Michael Bamberg & Alexandra Georgakopoulou

Three Principles

According to Schütze (1984; but see also Kallmeyer & Schütze, 1977), a narrator is obliged to follow three basic principles when narrating: (i) “Kondensierungszwang”, i.e., an obligation to increase the density of a story as for instance by not telling ‘everything’ that can be remembered but choosing relevant experiences for what is to be narrated; (ii) “Detaillierungszwang”, i.e., an obligation to give detailed background information about emotional constellations, motives and connected events so that a foreground can come to existence; and (iii) “Gestaltschliessungszwang”, i.e., an obligation to fit parts into a larger whole that gives some form of closure to the story as a whole. These three narrative principles are a mixture of what a story is (or is supposed to be) and what it means to tell a story, i.e., they follow from the structural features of stories and how to make a story plausible and intelligible to one’s audience. The argument is that a speaker needs to follow these principles, since otherwise he/she will not be narrating a story, but rather give a ‘description’ or engage in ‘argumentation’.

From: Narrative Analysis and Identity Research: A Case for ‘Small Stories’ by Michael Bamberg

Riessman, Analysis of Personal Narratives

'Analysis of Personal Narratives' by Catherine Kohler Riessman. In Handbook of Interview Research: Context and Method.  J. F. Gubrium and J. A. Holstein (Eds.). Thousand Oaks: Sage, 2002.

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Riessman opens the paper with an account of a commonly found problem in interview research: the long and lengthy responses that interviewees give:

"It is a common experience for investigators to carefully craft interview questions, only to have participants respond with lengthy accounts-long stories that appear, on the surface, to have little to do with the question." 
…
"If  participants resisted our efforts to contain their lengthy narratives, they were nonetheless quite aware of the rules of conventional storytelling.  After coming to the end of the long and complex story of a marriage, a participant would sometimes say, "Uh, I'm afraid I got a little lost.  What was the question you asked?"

These responses were identified as narratives, and narrative analysis grew to be a wide and varied field. 

Riessman limits discussion about narrative research to first-person accounts in interviews in this paper.  She presents background references on the "narrative turn" and the shift in interview approaches to more relaxed styles which are open to participants' personal choices about how to organise meaning in their lives.  Narrative analysis methods are presented as one possible approach, and an appropriate one for life disruptions, politics, social movements and macro-level phenomena.  Personal narratives are acknowledged to serve many purposes - "to remember, argue, convince, engage or entertain their audiences."

She acknowledges the cultural relation involved in human storytelling, both in reference to the culture-based analysis of Ken Plummer, but also in relation to her own work.  She states:

Storytelling is a relational activity that encourages others to listen, to share and to empathize.  It is a collaborative practice and assumes that tellers and listeners/questioners interact in particular cultural milieus and historical contexts, which are essential to interpretation.  Analysis in narrative studies opens up forms of telling about experience, not simply the content to which language refers.  We ask, "Why was the story told in that way?"

Narratives are acknowledged to be located in the place, time and society in which they inhabit. 

Approaches which consider the entire life-history as narrative are placed in sharp contrast to event-centred approaches such as that of William Labov, which are in turn contrasted with "extended accounts of lives that develop over the course of interviews."  The latter are treated as an evolving series of stories which build to a larger interaction-framed narrative.  She states they are distinguished by:

Presentation of and reliance on detailed transcripts of interview excerpts, attention to the structural features of discourse, analysis of the co-production of narratives through the dialogic exchange between interviewer and participant, and a comparative orientation to interpreting similarities and contrasts among participants' life stories.

All three approaches share sequential and temporal views of narrative structure; one action is given as consequential for the next.  Structuring can also be thematic, spatial, or episodic.

Riessman acknowledges that not all talk in interviews is 'narrative' and suggests that a movement into and out of narrative structures is signalled through the use of entrance and exit talk.  However such movements are not always clearly bounded, and are co-negotiated; analysis needs to consider "paralinguistic utterances ("uhms"), false starts, interruptions and other subtle forms of interaction." 

Narratives can be analysed textually, conversationally, culturally, politically/historically, and performatively.  Riessman gives examples of people who have addressed narratives in these ways.  The analytic approach used can also affect the type of transcription required; depending on whether the focus is on interactional co-construction, culture or conflict resolution.  The researcher selects where a narrative segment starts and stops.  Thus the investigator "'infiltrates' the text."

Riessman argues for analysing narrative in terms of performance (see Langellier, 1989/2001): when we tell a story about our lives we are 'performing' our preferred identity.  This is related to Erving Goffman's (1959/1981) powerful use of the dramaturgical metaphor, where "social actors stage performances of desirable selves to preserve 'face' in situations of difficulty, thus managing potentially 'spoiled' identities."  The presumption here is that informants do not reveal an "essential self as much as they perform a preferred one." 

This approach therefore also strengthens an argument to consider linguistic performative acts; emphasis and enhancement, repetition, paralinguistic features and gestures, appeals to the audience, and body movement (see also Bauman, 1986).  Social positioning is presented as a useful point of entry for analysis, as it is open to many interpretive questions: such as who, where, how are actors positioned, what is the position of the audience, what are told as the 'turning points' and how are scenes contrasted.

The truth of a story from a performative or social constructivist stance can therefore be recognised as less important than understanding the meanings of events as located within culture and history.  It becomes 'irrelevant' as to whether the events told 'really' occurred as reported.

In the concluding comments of the paper she emphasises that the narrative approach is one of many, and should not be considered a panacea.  The approach works well with a small, detailed data set, and in contrast, poorly with a large number of participants as the analytic detail required is prohibitive and time-consuming.  She emphasises that the approach is still useful for representing and analysing the multiplicity of identities which can be presented by an informant and opening a discursive space for participants.

The approach presented in this paper brings together the study of event, experience and cultural narratives, while acknowledging the performative aspect of storytelling in co-construction of narratives.  It is a compelling argument, and acknowledges that it is only one of many possible approaches that could be taken to the text: as the approaches which can be taken to narratives are wide, diverse and can be conflicting.  Admittedly, more discussion could have been made about the varieties of approach and how they contrast, as well as other types of narrative than those found in interview contexts (which are acknowledged, but again not discussed).  There is also room for discussion about 'performances': are they effective, successful, etc. However, overall the paper presents a clear, cohesive approach to narrative analysis.

Experience-Centred Narratives

Notes take directly from `Experience-Centred and Culturally-Oriented Approaches to Narrative’ paper by Corinne Squire.  Forthcoming in M. Andrews, C. Squire, M. Tamboukou, Doing Narrative Research, London: Sage.

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1.  What are the major differences between event-centred and experience-centred approaches?

• The event-centred approach excludes talk involving ‘narration of self’, representation itself, and co-construction.
• The experience-centred approach therefore assumes that narratives are sequential and meaningful, display transformation or change, re-present experience (reconstituting it as well as expressing it) and are definitively human.
• Unlike event-centred approaches, personal narration includes all sequential and meaningful stories of personal experience.  Storytelling is deeply social, and constitute and maintain sociality (Denzin).
• Researchers may look at hard-to-transcribe fragments, contradictions and gaps within narratives, as well as the language used.  They may draw on larger discourses or genres for interpretation.  Sometimes the approach can be expanded to also include analysis of text and image rather than just oral tellings.
• Event-centred approaches gather corpuses of stories, whereas experience-centred researchers are more likely to constrain themselves to a specific number of participants, usually small.

2.  What characterises the Ricoeurian and Brunerian account of narrative?

• Ricoeur presented the experience-centred notion that “time becomes human to the extent that it is articulated through a narrative mode,” and that narrative is co-constructed ‘practical wisdom.’  Bruner describes narrative as transgression and restoration of canonic understanding.
• For Ricoeur, top-down and bottom-up interpretive procedures are used to address the hermeneutic circle of interpretation.  For many researchers (e.g. Freeman) the hermeneutic circle never closes.

3. What are some of the difficulties faced when applied to social science research?

• Ricoeur’s definition of narrative is an ideal. 
• Can we identify a ‘good story’?  Chamberlayne, Crossley, Holloway and Jefferson seem to think so, but this prescriptive approach may overly narrow our criteria.
• Do we need our stories to have endings or futures built into them?  Freeman, for example, thinks that stories are often tied to possibilities within life. 
• There is debate over whether the Ricoeurian approach can be extended to look at the subconscious in relation to psychoanalysis. Some researchers argue that the unsayable stands outside the concerns of narrative research.
• Time is still a focus in the Ricoeurian approach, and this is still restrictive – space and theme may also be powerful organisers of human experience.
• There is a loss of attention to language itself, emphasis is on meaning.
• There is debate over how linked to actual experience stories are.  Following Ricoeur, Venn notes that stories form a third space between the real and the imagined.

4. What are the abiding benefits of taking this kind of approach?

• The openness, flexibility, and reflexivity of this approach are some of the most useful features.

5. What culturally centred approaches are there?

• Socially and Culturally-Oriented approaches include those espoused by Plummer and Riessman.
• Plummer thinks that intimate disclosure narratives and the interpretive communities that they build are highly significant personally, socially and politically. Interpretive communities have to exist for stories to be told, and build collective identities.
• Narrative for Riessman is a mode of interpersonal, social and cultural positioning and negotiation.  An interview is a co-constructed narrative – and a narrative is the full personal narrative told by the interview.  Riessman’s framing brings together the study of event, experience and cultural narratives.

6. What Problems are there with these approaches?

• Culture is not static, and genres are always changing.  Genres will be understood differently by different people and cultures. 
• The cultural approach has also been commented to neglect individuals’ own stories. 
• This approach does not fit well with postmodern approaches to constructed, distributed and multiple subjectivities. It is possible to argue that the ‘social construction of self’ and the ‘expression of self’ that are assumed in both Plummer’s and Riessman’s work rely on different conceptions of self that cannot be reconciled (modern and postmodern respectively). 
• Many equally persuasive readings are available for any story (Freeman) and interpretations vary across time and place (Andrews, Riessman).
• The approaches within this banner are wide, diverse and can be conflicting.

Labovian Analysis

The work of Labov and Waletzky (1967) and Labov (1972) was the starting point for many researchers in the field.  It has become paradigmatic, and has, to some extent, functioned normatively, in Narrative Research.

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How does Labov describe an event narrative?

The Labovian approach treats personal narrative as story text and produces structural analyses of specific oral personal event narratives.  It is event centred and text centred as it is considered a text which presents temporally or causally ordered events. 

A minimal narrative is “a sequence of two clauses which are temporally ordered”

Six part model:

1. Abstract (A) - What the story is about
2. Orientation (O) - Who, When Where, etc.
3. Complicating Action (CA) - What happened then.
4. Evaluation (E) - What this means
5. Result (R) - What finally happened
6. Coda (C) - Summary, return to floor (optional)

There are three main types of evaluation (Labov, 1972):

• External Evaluation – Overt, narrator stands outside the action
• Embedded Evaluation – Narrator describes feelings at the time, thus staying within narrative
• Evaluative Action – Report actions which reveal emotions

These also include different types of device, such as intensifiers, comparators, and explicatives.

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What are the advantages and limitations of this approach?

Advantages:

• Detailed and rigorous approach.
• Excellent starting point for analysing different types of text – allows for comparison across amount of evaluation, type and differences in evaluation, changes in event narratives or evaluation over time or circumstance, changes across audience.
• Allows structural comparison
• Allows analysis of narrator perspective – As Mishler (1986:243) said “everything said functions to express, confirm and validate the claimed identity.”
• Particularly suited to event-narrative research around `sex, death and moral injury’.
• Personal event narratives are important, and can be used to tell us something about differences between times and situations.
• Labov’s views have shifted over time to include the concept of reportability: “Pointless stories are met (in English) with the withering rejoinder, `So what?’” (Labov, 1972:366).

Difficulties:

• Often difficult to divide speech into Labovian categories – the temporal sequencing and the evaluation elements can cause problems.
• L&W define a specific speech act as narrative which appears to exclude what we would want to also call narratives (such as habitual narratives, future narratives, co-constructed stories). 
• The personal narrative is a monologue, audience and co-construction is considered irrelevant, and the speech act is considered in isolation. 
• There is also no allowance for the partial and constructed nature of accounts of past events.
• Some people may tell Labovian ‘event stories’ more often than others depending on culture, gender, class.

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Riessman (1993) reconceptualises the Labovian approach to allow for the limitations of Labov’s criteria by taking ‘narrative’ to refer to both the entire response to an interview (if it contained sequential, thematic and structural integrity) and the smaller Labovian narrative segments.  This allowed her to: “come close to seeing into [the narrator’s] subjective experience – what ‘life’ means to her at the moment of telling” and identify tensions between “the real and the wished for, the story and the dream” (Riessman, 1993:52).  The latter expresses what to me is the major flaw in the Labovian approach – it presumes a correlation between event and reality and leaves no room for the wished for or imagined.

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Notes from:

Wendy Patterson (Forthcoming). 'Narratives of Events: Labovian Narrative Analysis and its Limitations'  In M. Andrews, C. Squire and M. Tamboukou (Eds.), Doing Narrative Research.  London, Sage:  Forthcoming.
and
William Labov (1972). Language in the Inner City: Studies in the Black English Vernacular.  Oxford: Blackwell.

Fish Tales - Written and Spoken

The below story is of a memorable incident from when I was younger involving my mother, a fish and a suntan cream bottle. It is a story I have previously told in relation to vegetarianism and as a story about my mother. There were differences between the story I have written above and the one I told. The told story used more expressive pausing, and was supported by tone, gesture and facial expression. I was able to work more with humour.  I also told a supporting side story in more depth as I was not limited by concerns about length. The written story was fixed and had been written with stylistic concerns and therefore didn’t incorporate pauses and ums errs etc. as part of the story. With the spoken story when the listener looked like they could use more information I elaborated – thus the listener had an impact on the story. In addition this story was changed slightly, as listener knew certain background information about characters, which changed the tone, impact and ending evaluation.

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So, I was sixteen; full of life, beliefs and determination. I was attempting to be a vegetarian. It was not working, and had not been working for about a year. My mother had had difficulties with the concept, so we came to an agreement. I could be vegetarian during the week as long as I ate Sunday Lunch and whatever I was given if we were visiting relatives. It was my only option at that age, so I became an off-peak vegetarian.

That summer I was on holiday with my parents and staying with relatives in their summer house in Øyerhavn on Varaldsøy.

I had already had the memorable `lamb-stew/reindeer’ incident, and was trying to put it behind me, when my parents decided to go trail-line fishing. Mostly for the exercise, I think, as they certainly did not expect to catch anything.

So, I held onto the trailing line while my mother and father rowed around the fjord.

There was a tugging at the line.

"Mum! I think we may have caught something!"
"No. Don't worry, it is probably just caught on a bit of seaweed. You keep hold of it."

Five minutes later:
"Muuuuum. I really don't think it is seaweed!"
"No. It just feels as if there is something on the end, but there isn't really."
"Mum. I really don't like this."
"OK. Let's reel it in so we can see what it is wrong."

So, we reeled in the line.

At the end of the line, there was, a fish.

A real living fish.

A real living fish caught by one of the barbs on the line.

A real living fish, caught through one set of gills, by one of the barbs on the line.

I had had enough. I was a teenage vegetarian and wanted none of this. I watched as my parents tried to deal with it.

They really had not expected to catch anything.

"OK. So we need to lift it into the boat."
"We didn't bring a net."
"OK. So we hope that the line is strong enough."

And so, they did.

The fish was lifted, by the barb through its gills, into the boat. It almost tore, but was just strong enough to get it into the rowing boat.

I was not at all impressed. In fact, I was appalled.

But worse was to come.

"OK. So we need to kill it quickly."
"We didn't bring a knife."
"OK. I'll find something to hit it with."

I watched as my mother picked up a bottle of Nivea Suntan Cream, and proceeded to bash the fish with it. She hit it with all her strength.

It died quickly. (Whether from lack of oxygen, confusion, damage to its gill, or suntan-cream attack, I cannot say.)

I sat there, in the boat, as I was rowed back to the bay. I could not believe what had just happened.

But, there was the fish and there was my mum and there was the bottle of suntan cream next to her.

...

That evening, we had fish for dinner. I had to eat it. After all, we were visiting relatives, and I did not get a say in the matter.

After staring at it for a long time, I ate.

It was the best tasting fish in the world.

...

Since that day I have never tried to be a vegetarian. I do not have it in me. I just cannot justify it.

 

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What is the difference between a written and a spoken story?

• Expanded in the telling.
• Depending on the audience some things may not need to be mentioned or referred to, they can be taken as presumed. The reverse can also be true.
• Style and structure are important in written work, whereas pauses, tone and laughter are important in spoken stories.
• Written stories can be revisited but are fixed, whereas told stories are mutable – each telling is different and each retelling is a new version.
• The audience may also interact with you while telling to help shape or co-construct the narrative.

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I felt it was quite a shame that I did not have a copy transcribed of my spoken version of this story.  It would have been very interesting to note the differences between the two; such as the differences between categories used (more expected to be present in the written story – and indeed they were all present), amount of repetition (although plenty was use in the written, more could be expected in the spoken), performative aspects, and the effect of co-construction. 

My creative writing style mimics that of a spoken story in several respects as I prefer to show not tell.  This was interesting as it meant that much of the evaluation in my story (about my memories of my mother killing a fish) was Evaluative Action, rather than External or Embedded Evaluation. 

The Labovian approach does provide a usefully prescriptive way to approach an event story, but I am convinced that limiting the concept of narrative to that which fits this schema is prohibitively restrictive.  This is very true for my research where I also gather habitual and co-constructed stories for analysis.

NR Course Notes - Week One

What is a narrative?

Key feature of a narrative:

• Involves time, or causal sequence. Often defined as also involving transformation. Some emphasise the personal nature and particularity of narratives. Often used to refer to broader structures than stories, but sometimes theorists use the reverse.

Key feature of a story:

• Involves time, or causal sequence. Often defined as also involving transformation. Some emphasise the personal nature and particularity of stories. Often used to refer to ‘little’ narratives – but sometimes theorists use the reverse.

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Why is narrative account valuable?

Reasons include:

• Apparent universality
• Interdisciplinarity
• Bridges theory and practice
• Is academic yet accessible
• Lies between modernism and postmodernism
• Offers different levels of analysis, from microstructure, through content, to large scale context.
• Allows some relationship to politics

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What are the difficulties of narrative research?

Reasons include:

• Theoretical and methodological diversity of approaches
• Theoretical and methodological incompatibility of approaches
• Implications, if any, of narrative findings, at personal, social and political level

How I got here

As written as an introduction to the Narrative Research group E-Seminar:

I'm a PhD student and associate tutor at the University of Sussex looking at communication and group process in software development. 

I got here by a somewhat erratic path. 

I started off studying philosophy for my undergraduate degree (I was, and still am, smitten by the subject).  While studying I specifically focussed on philosophy of language and cognitive linguistics, as I realised I had a particular interest in how language related to the world.  I continued to look at language representation in computer systems and programming for my MSc (in Intelligent Systems), but I soon realised that I was more interested in how people worked with computers than in computers themselves. 

After some years working as a researcher in algorithms and adaptive systems I decided I had a particular interest I wanted to follow for PhD research - which was in relation to a recent shift in the view of how best to develop software.  The change was from a view where software development involved programmers working on their own to one where they actually needed to work together and communicate with each other to produce good work.  Verbal communication between programmers is seen as vital for developing software. This fascinated me and led to my current research.  I am particularly interested in programmer language and storytelling in this instance - where programmers are working closely together - especially in relation to programmer identity negotiation through technical and social stories.