Social Issues in the Understanding of Narrative

This paper proposes a number of social issues that are essential in understanding any given story, and thus, that must be included in a comprehensive approach to computational modeling of narrative. It focuses on oral narratives, and on the social event of the telling of a story. For participants in the telling, the central social issue is the story’s evaluation or meaning: the point or moral of the story. Value or meaning is created relative to social membership, and so, to understand evaluation, it is not sufficient to understand a story solely as a bounded unit. Therefore, this paper examines the ways in which narrative meaning is negotiated between narrator and interlocutors. It demonstrates how a given story can take on different meanings for different audiences. The life course of a story is also proposed as relevant dimension for understanding. Ephemeral stories are distinguished from stories which have multiple tellings, both for the stories of individuals, and for stories which form part of the story stock of institutions. Storytelling rights are also considered: who within a group has the right to tell a particular story on a particular occasion. These issues are proposed as potential meta-data to be used in the analysis of stories. Finally, the paper indicates an area in which computational understanding of narrative, including these social issues, has potential for practical applications: as part of current commercial knowledge capture and archiving activities.