WEEKEND ROUND-UP: NARATIV E-COURSE, AND OBAMA'S DATA MINING

2 6 PRINCIPLES from Narativ Circle on Vimeo.


NARATIV E-COURSE: Narativ is an organization that trains corporations, nonprofits, and individuals on how to listen to and tell stories. In exchange for your name and email address, you get access to the workbook and six short videos they have in their free e-course. In the first video in the series, above, the organization's co-founder Murray Nossel states the organization's six storytelling principles, starting with the notion that "Our brains are hard-wired for story." (I also wrote briefly about Narativ here. Also read this article in Forbes Magazine about Murray and the Narativ method. 

OBAMA MINES DATA FROM AMERICANS' STORIES: Here's a fascinating Slate article by Sasha Issenberg about President Obama's "Dreamcatcher" project. That project uses scientific methods to analyze data from the stories that constituents submit online, so that the Administration can better understand -- and respond to -- the hopes and fears of the electorate. This effort calls to mind three other projects I've written about, namely a GlobalGiving project to assess a community's needs and interests by analyzing its "micro-narratives"; the Defense Advance Research Projects Agency's study of "Narrative Networks," to understand propaganda and prevent terrorism; and an MIT professor's attempts to teach a computer to understand stories. Together, these projects indicate a scientific approach to stories, their content, meaning, and appeal.

MOVEMENT STORYTELLING

Here's the beginning of a post I wrote for the Orton Family Foundation's blog, "Cornerstones." Click here to visit their blog and read the whole post, which is about the stories that social movements tell to and about themselves.

Like other gay bars of the 1950s and 1960s, the Stonewall Inn in New York City was subject to regular police raids. Mostly, patrons were so afraid of being exposed and losing their jobs, livelihoods, families and reputations that they suffered silently through the raids. But that would only go so far.

Denizens of the Stonewall included lesbians, gay men and transgendered people, some of whom had little to lose, and for whatever reason they had reached a breaking point. When the police raided the bar on June 28, 1969, patrons fought back. The riots that took place marked a confrontational new tack in the fight for LGBT rights. And in the years since, annual marches—now known as Pride Parades—have taken place the last weekend of June in cities around the world.

 

That, in a nutshell, is the origin story of the modern LGBT rights movement. Told, retold, contested and continually adapted, it is just one of the stories about where the movement comes from and what it stands for.... Continue reading here.

WEEKEND ROUND-UP: CREATIVE COMPUTERS, AND TWITTERATURE

SMART PROGRAMS READ SHAKESPEARE: Happy new year! In recognition of the approaching robot war -- didn't the Mayans predict this for 2012, or am I mistaken? -- a "Studio 360" radio segment called "Smart Computers Read Shakespeare." MIT computer scientist Patrick Winston (pictured) says that, in order for computer intelligence to become creative, we have to teach it to understand stories. This segment is part of an interesting episode called "Are Computers Creative?" Also pertinent to narrative is the segment on 420-character stories. 

LITERATURE ON TWITTER: More on the topic of ultra-short literature. An RW Deutsch Foundation blog post from this past summer on "Serious Twitterature: The Online Future of the Novel." The post explores how a novel, albeit a relatively short one, can be written or released over the course of time in 140-character tweets. The author writes, "As a forum for new types of literary work, Twitter's greatest asset is its ability to capture a story in real-time" -- but that's also weakness, because works produced on Twitter are particular to their time.

WEEKEND ROUND-UP: LISTENING

LISTENING IN TEXAS: The Texas After Violence Project uses storytelling to increase the peace. With the tagline "Listening for a change," the organization "works to create a foundation for public dialogue on violence in Texas, especially murder and execution. We carefully listen to people affected by violence, including friends and family members of murdered and executed people, as well as police officers, first responders, prosecutors, defense attorneys, prison employees, victim and defendant advocates, and others involved in Texas' criminal justice system. TAVP records their statements, archives them, makes them public with the narrators' consent, and promotes conversations about the most effective, compassionate, and just ways to prevent and respond to violence." Read transcripts of some of the moving narratives here.

LISTENING IN AFRICA: In the New York Times last weekend, an op-ed by Hanning Menkell on "The Art of Listening" as practiced in Africa. The author says the best way to explain what he has learned from his 25 years of life in Africa (especially Mozambique) is "through a parable about why human beings have two ears but only one tongue. Why is this? Probably so that we have to listen twice as much as we speak." 

WEEKEND ROUND-UP: STORY-SHARING PLATFORMS

STORY-SHARING PLATFORMS: A couple story-sharing platforms I've heard of or been exploring recently, one small and beautiful, another is sprawling and stripped-down. Cowbird.com is a new site that describes itself as a "small community of storytellers, interested in telling deeper, longer-lasting, more nourishing stories than you're likely to find anywhere else on the web." The site enables you to "keep a gorgeous diary of your life, incorporating photography, sound, subtitles, maps, timelines, characters, dedications, and more." The site has started with the saga of the Occupy movement, and does indeed feature gorgeous photos and other features. On the other end of the spectrum is the Experience Project, which now hosts a total of over 12 million experience stories on pretty much any topic under the sun, organized in such categories as "Education," "Family and Friends," and "Pets and Animals." Members write their experiences in text, and can create a profile, follow other users, and respond to others' experiences and questions. Theoretically, a single site could join the aesthetics of Cowbird with the flexibility of the Experience Project. However, the investment of time that Cowbird's pictures, audio, and other features require makes it less likely that the site will attract a huge user base; and the rapid exchange of stories on the Experience Project means that users probably won't want to spend lots of time on craft, any more than a Twitter user would.

WEEKEND ROUND-UP: FORGETTING, REMEMBERING

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TIMESLIPS STORYTELLING: An NBC news story about the TimeSlips storytelling project for seniors with dementia. Check out my summer 2010 podcast interview with project coordinator Anne Basting, who also wrote the book "Forget Memory: Creating Better Lives for People With Dementia." 

TWEETING WORLD WAR II: A New York Times story about a young Oxford grad named Alwyn Collinson who recently started tweeting the history of World War II, starting with an account of Hitler's invasion of Poland -- about 72 years to the hour after the actual event. The Twitter feed is called RealTimeWWII.

WEEKEND ROUND-UP: NEW MEDIA STORYTELLING

Above, a 4-minute video of Joe Sabia talking about the evolving technology used to tell stories. 

On a related note, take a look at this New Scientist article that lays out some fine examples of e-storytelling; also worth checking out is the more complete electronic literature collection from which it draws.

I'm relieved to report that neither the video presenter nor the article above make any extravagant claims about how new media are revolutionizing storytelling. Certainly, there are exciting new forms taking their place alongside the novel and the film and so on. An online story-game allows you to choose your own path, or an iPad app lets you get the back-story on the characters and places in a novel, or you can post a comment on a video story. To my mind, the impulses behind the supposedly "new" interactive storytelling -- the desire to get lost in or contribute to a story -- have not changed. And there are analogue counterparts to most of these new technologies. They have not -- yet -- fundamentally altered the nature of storytelling, which relies on imagination and conversation just as much as it ever did.

WEEKEND ROUND-UP: LISTENING, IMMERSION, AND PEACE-MAKING

 
LISTENING: Above is a TED talk by Julian Treasure, on the topic of listening (sorry for the funky dimensions). It has to do not just with how we listen to other people, but how we take in our whole sonic environment. On the TED website there's an interactive transcript of the talk, and more information about the speaker's work on his blog. 

GETTING LOST IN STORIES: In a book published earlier this year, Frank Rose explores how we get lost, or immersed, in stories. In that book, "The Art of Immersion: How the Digital Generation is Remaking Hollywood, Madison Avenue, and the Way We Tell Stories," Rose says that new narrative forms (such as the novel) and technologies (the internet) have allowed us to become ever more immersed -- and involved -- in the stories we hear and tell. Rose argues in favor of the virtues of transmedia storytelling, but admits that not all transmedia stories are equal, or necessarily any good. 

STOPPING VIOLENCE BY SHARING STORIES: The StoryTelling & Organizing Project (STOP) is a collaboration of several anti-violence groups that collects and shares stories about "everyday people taking action to end interpersonal violence." By sharing stories, the project aims to build true community-based solutions to such violence, ones that do not involve the police, child protective services, or other social services, but rather are formulated by the communities most affected. What can we learn from stories? STOP says, "We can learn a lot about what works and what doesn't. We can find out what helped survivors feel supported or what helped people change to stop their violence. We can get good ideas about how family, friends, neighbors, and community members can create safety and accountability among ourselves. We can build healthy, self-determined communities." Listen to some of their recorded stories here.  

WEEKEND ROUND-UP: QUOTES ON STORYTELLING

This weekend, some quotes on storytelling. The first set of quotes are selected from this excellent page of storytelling resources and websites, assembled by Elizabeth Figa, Ph.D., Assistant Professor at the University of North Texas School of Library and Information Sciences. The second set of quotes, starting with the one by Salman Rushdie, was gathered and presented by Patti J. Christensen on this page of Storyteller.net. 

"Man [sic] is eminently a storyteller. His search for a purpose, a cause, an ideal, a mission and the like is largely a search for a plot and a pattern in the development of his life story-a story that is basically without meaning or pattern."

 —Eric Hoffer, "The Passionate State of Mind" 

"Long before I wrote stories, I listened for stories. Listening for them is something more acute than listening to them. I suppose it's an early form of participation in what goes on. Listening children know stories are there. When their elders sit and begin, children are just waiting and hoping for one to come out, like a mouse from its hole."

—Eudora Welty, "One Writer's Beginnings" 

"The destiny of the world is determined less by the battles that are lost and won than by the stories it loves and believes in."  

—Harold Goddard, "The Meaning of Shakespeare" 

"There is a certain embarrassment about being a storyteller in these times when stories are considered not quite as satisfying as statements and statements not quite as satisfying as statistics; but in the long run, a people is known, not by its statements or its statistics, but by the stories it tells."

— Flannery O'Connor, "Mystery and Manners" 

"All human beings have an innate need to hear and tell stories and to have a story to live by. Religion, whatever else it has done, has provided one of the main ways of meeting this abiding need."  

—Harvey Cox, "The Seduction of the Spirit"

Those who do not have power over the story that dominates their lives, the power to retell it, rethink it, deconstruct it, joke about it, and change it as times change, truly are powerless, because they cannot think new thoughts. 

—Salman Rushdie 

The universe is made of stories, not atoms. 

—Muriel Rukeyser

To be a person is to have a story to tell. 

—Isak Dinesen 

There is no agony like bearing an untold story inside of you.

—Maya Angelou

A caveat. A funny New York Times op-ed by Brian Morton last summer talked about how some popular quotations attributed to Thoreau, Gandhi, and Nelson Mandela were all desperately wrong. A new-age-sounding inspirational remark supposedly from Mandela's inaugural address was actually made by self-help guru Marianne Williamson. That's all to say, I have no idea if the above quotations are correct, I haven't gone back to the original sources to verify them. I just offer them here for the ideas, and not so much for the sources. 

WEEKEND ROUND-UP: STORIES IN WAR AND PEACE

DEPT. OF DEFENSE RESEARCHERS STUDY NARRATIVE: The continuing saga of a project I wrote about early last year. The Pentagon's research arm is studying -- well, to put it plainly, how stories create terrorists. In a project it calls "Narrative Networks," the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, is soliciting research proposals "in the areas of (1) quantitative analysis of narratives, (2) understanding the effects narratives have on human psychology and its affiliated neurobiology, and (3) modeling, simulating, and sensing—especially in stand-off modalities—these narrative influences." I love that phrase "stand-off modalities," which I assume would include wars, hostage situations, terrorist attacks, etc.

Though I have my political differences with Pentagon brass, and my doubts about whether narrative can be quantified in the way they're proposing, I'd have to agree with the reasoning behind the project: "Narratives exert a powerful influence on human thoughts and behavior. They consolidate memory, shape emotions, cue heuristics and biases in judgment, influence in-group/out-group distinctions, and may affect the fundamental contents of personal identity. It comes as no surprise that because of these influences stories are important in security contexts: for example, they change the course of insurgencies, frame negotiations, play a role in political radicalization, influence the methods and goals of violent social movements, and likely play a role in clinical conditions important to the military such as post-traumatic stress disorder. Therefore, understanding the role stories play in a security context, and the spatial and temporal dimensions of that role is especially important."

NONPROFIT STORYTELLING: Not just the Department of Defense, but also folks in the philanthropic sector want to better understand and tell stories. Fenton Communications strategist Mike Smith offers "Six Common 'Character' Flaws in Nonprofit Storytelling," in two blog posts, part one and part two. Stories have to have characters, and Mike gives these useful tips. "(1) People, not organizations, are characters. (2) Make your protagonist struggle. (3) Let them [your characters] speak. (4) Don't forget the quirky stuff. (5) Create some type of antagonist." (6) Consider privacy issues when telling the stories of real people -- there's more flexibility there than you may think.  The full blog posts flesh out these ideas, and give examples.