Human Storytelling Research Articles

Storytelling variants based on semiotic relations

An intriguing phenomenon in human storytelling – inexhaustible source of inspiration for digital storytelling – is our ability to still recognize a story that the narrator has felt free to change to a considerable extent. However, observing how folktales have appeared and disseminated through different countries along the centuries, we may notice that our favorite stories have evolved no less dramatically in the course of the oral storytelling tradition. In this paper, taking Little Red Riding Hood as example, we review a small number of variants of this universally cherished story, in an attempt to understand how variants emerge. Our study is founded on the classification of types and motifs contained in the Index of Antti Aarne and Stith Thompson, and examines the hypothesis that variants are often the consequence of type interactions, which we propose to characterize in terms of semiotic relations associated with the so-called four master tropes. The paper presents our analysis of the variant-formation phenomenon and describes the implementation of a computational system capable of generating new variants by applying the proposed semiotic relations.

What If Colorful Images Become More Important than Words? Visual Representations as the Basic Building Blocks of Human Communication and Dynamic Storytelling

Pre-historic communication included doing cave paintings, for example, of wild animals. Today, we continue to use images when communicating, most notably with videos and other such recordings. The advent and popularity of social networks on the Internet is based on the exchange of messages but for the most part on the sharing of images and videos. Although we are still generally very geared toward communication using words (and numbers) rather than visual representations, we foresee that a specific language that produces movement in the brain will soon be developed. The Business Narrative Modelling Language (BNML) has been used in various research contexts. BNML is based on pictorial representations, while incorporating business ontologies, which are studies of words and language to create a vocabulary that best represents relevant meanings in the business context to optimize information exchange. Do you prefer the narrative or do you prefer visual representations or would you rather have both? Providing examples of BNML, about servant leadership, we maintain that text without figures leads to incomplete communication, and vice versa—especially true for the “Millennium generation.” Leaders in business should strive to communicate more visually and diagrammatically, encouraging such communication among their employees, as much of knowledge today is tacit, and so difficult to communicate solely with the written word. Furthermore, words should be chosen carefully, to avoid overload and lack of comprehension, and using pre-defined ontologies is a good way of achieving this.

Building and Verifying a Predictive Model of Interruption Resumption

We built and evaluated a predictive model for resuming after an interruption. Two different experiments were run. The first experiment showed that people used a transactive memory process, relying on another person to keep track of where they were after being interrupted while retelling a story. A memory for goals model was built using the ACT-R/E cognitive architecture that matched the cognitive and behavioral aspects of the experiment. In a second experiment, the memory for goals model was put on an embodied robot that listened to a story being told. When the human storyteller attempted to resume the story after an interruption, the robot used the memory for goals model to determine if the person had forgotten the last thing that was said. If the model predicted that the person was having trouble remembering the last thing said, the robot offered a suggestion on where to resume. Signal detection analyses showed that the model accurately predicted when the person needed help.

Human Rights Storytelling and Trauma Narrative in Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go

This article examines Kazuo Ishiguro's novel Never Let Me Go as a type of Bildungsroman that presents coded models of contemporary human rights issues. It shows how autobiographical storytelling functions within the novel as a form of rights claim that gives voice to the suffering of an oppressed social group. The article demonstrates how the text grapples with the effects of storytelling on individual psychologies, both as a constructive response to atrocity and as a potentially dubious method of overcoming traumatic experience. It also underscores Ishiguro's sensitivity to the ways that aestheticized forms of traumatic experience are consumed by the general public with a mixture of empathy, indifference, and perversion.

LPDT2

LPDT2 is the metaverse incarnation of Roy Ascott's groundbreaking new media art work La Plissure du Texte/The Pleating of the Text, created in 1983 and shown in Paris at the Muse de l'Art moderne de la Ville de Paris during that same year. Whereas in 1983 the text was pleated by human storytellers; in the metaverse the storytellers show novel and unexpected attributes: an emergent textual architecture/geography, as well as a number of autonomous, coded, robot avatars which dwell inside this bizarre, literary landscape pleating the text by acting as communication nodes between the narrators of this new version of the tale.

When White Buffalo Calf Woman Meets Oedipus on the Road

This paper constructs a conversation about male violence between psychoanalytic feminism and Lakota psychology, based on interviews carried out at the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota in the United States. The paper has four aims. First, it outlines the concepts in feminist psychoanalytic theory that inform this study, and discusses key dilemmas that arise in working across cultural borders established through histories of colonial domination. Second, the paper identifies areas of common ground between feminist psychoanalytic theory and indigenous psychologies, focusing on their shared emphasis on traumatic splits in the human psyche, gender development, and storytelling. Third, the paper describes the Cangleska program developed by Lakota practitioners at Pine Ridge-a systematically conceived set of services that combines psychological, cultural, and political analyses of violence-and explains how Cangleska offers insights that go beyond the borders of indigenous communities. Fourth, the paper draws out lines of convergence between Kleinian psychoanalysis and Lakota principles in their ethical responses to violence and discusses the implications of such convergences for the wider anti-violence movement.

Generating expressive speech for storytelling applications

Work on expressive speech synthesis has long focused on the expression of basic emotions. In recent years, however, interest in other expressive styles has been increasing. The research presented in this paper aims at the generation of a storytelling speaking style, which is suitable for storytelling applications and more in general, for applications aimed at children. Based on an analysis of human storytellers' speech, we designed and implemented a set of prosodic rules for converting "neutral" speech, as produced by a text-to-speech system, into storytelling speech. An evaluation of our storytelling speech generation system showed encouraging results.

The origins of narrative

This article presents work in progress towards a better understanding of the origins of narrative. Assuming an evolutionary and developmental continuity of mental experiences, we propose a grounding of human narrative capacities in non-verbal narrative transactions in non-human animals, and in pre-verbal narrative transactions of human children. We discuss narrative intelligence in the context of the evolution of primate (social) intelligence, and with respect to the particular cognitive limits that constrain the development of human social networks and societies. We explain the Narrative Intelligence Hypothesis which suggests that the evolutionary origin of communicating in a narrative format co-evolved with increasingly complex social dynamics among our human ancestors. This article gives examples of social interactions in non-human primates and how these can be interpreted in terms of narrative formats. Due to the central role of narrative in human communication and social interaction, we discuss how research into the origins of narrative can impact the development of humane technology which is designed to meet the biological, cognitive and social needs of human story-tellers.

Myth and Terror on the Editorial Page: The New York Times Responds to September 11, 2001

This article studies New York Times editorials in the aftermath of September 11 from the perspective of myth. After defining myth and reviewing a wide range of scholarship that approaches news as myth, this article considers the ways in which editorials can be understood as myth. Textual analysis shows that over the course of four weeks, the New York Times drew from four central myths to portray events: the End of Innocence, the Victims, the Heroes, and the Foreboding Future. More than editorial “themes” or political “issues,” these were myths that invoked archetypal figures and forms at the heart of human storytelling.

Learning from Other Worlds: Estrangement, Cognition, and the Politics of Science Fiction and Utopia

This is a collection of new essays on science fiction and utopian literature honouring the work of Darko Suvin, the scholar and literary theorist who co-founded the journal Science-Fiction Studies in 1973. The title of this volume attempts to convey the essence of cognitive estrangement' in relation to SF and utopia: that by imagining strange worlds we learn to see our own world in a new perspective. The contributors have all been influenced by Darko Suvin's belief that the double movement of estrangement and cognition reflects deep structures of human storytelling. from otherness is as natural and inevitable a process as the instinct for imitation and representation that Aristotle described in his Poetics. Though written from varying perspectives, the essays in Learning from Other Worlds pay tribute to the intellectual and personal inspiration of Darko Suvin to whom the essays are dedicated.

Lobbying: fantasy, reality or both? A health care public policy case study

AbstractThis paper provides a theoretical explanation for lobbying as interpersonal rhetorical communication based on the tenets of symbolic convergence theory (SCT). SCT is a general theory of communication in the symbolic interactionism paradigm. Nowhere in the extant communication literature, including the scholarly public relations research, is lobbying explicated in this way. This paper utilises a health care public policy case study to illustrate SCT in lobbying practice. The emphasis here is on how lobbyists use homo narrans, or human storytelling, in influential face‐to‐face information exchange with public policy decision makers to be persuasive on behalf of their clients. The ultimate aim of this paper is to build the current body of theoretical and practical knowledge about lobbying, to advance more positive perceptions of lobbyists and lobbying and to improve the practice of lobbying in producing effective public policy outcomes. Copyright © 2001 Henry Stewart Publications