Narrative Understanding Research Articles

Cuando la literatura y el cine se cuentan

La película The Fall (2006) de Tarsem Singh y el relato de J. D. Salinger «El hombre que ríe», incluido en la célebre colección de Nueve cuentos (1953), aparentemente tan dispares, están relacionadas no solo por su construcción metaficcional, sino por la intradiégesis de sus metaficciones y lo que provocan que están se desencadenen. Del mismo modo, la interpretación de los narratarios diegéticos es, en ambos casos, fundamental en el metarrelato, pues percibimos ambos desde el punto de vista de un niño que no alcanza a entender el mundo de los adultos.

Deep Learning Identification of Asthma Inhaler Techniques in Clinical Notes.

There are significant variabilities in clinicians' guideline-concordant documentation in asthma care. However, assessing clinicians' documentation is not feasible using only structured data but requires labor intensive chart review of electronic health records. Although the national asthma guidelines are available it is still challenging to use them as a real-time tool for providing feedback on adhering documentation guidelines for asthma care improvement. A certain guideline element, such as teaching or reviewing inhaler techniques, is difficult to capture by handcrafted rules since it requires contextual understanding of clinical narratives. This study examined a deep learning based natural language model, Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) coupled with distant supervision to identify inhaler techniques from clinical narratives. The BERT model with distant supervision outperformed the rule-based approach and achieved performance gain compared with the BERT without distant supervision.

The role of minority-language media in the construction of identity during middle childhood

The ‘transition phase’ between primary and secondary school represents an important milestone in the context of identity formation. For multilingual children, questions of cultural belonging and identity can add to issues and challenges of self-representation. Giddens notes how identity construction is made up of series of narratives that formulate an ‘ongoing “story” about the self’ (: 54). Media now representing an increasingly important aspect of social life, especially amongst young people. The focus of this research is to explore how the evolution of Welsh-language children’s media production practices has formed a unique understanding of media narratives that is intrinsically connected to Welsh identity and the maintenance of a national community (cf. : 233). Framing the debate within a minority-language context, this article explores how (Welsh/English) bilingual children in Wales navigate these multiple identities in this ‘in between space’ through their engagement with Welsh-language media texts. The research will draw on findings from a dual-phased research project conducted between 2012 and 2014.

Researching migrant entrepreneurship communities: a reflection through collaborative (auto)ethnographies

In this paper we offer a scholarly reflection about the value of ethnographic methods for studying migrant entrepreneurship; this reflection is seen specifically through the lens of our own migration experiences. Our positionalities and subjectivities, embedded in being migrants and researchers, offer this opportunity for in-depth reflection. Specifically, we examine what varieties of ethnographic research methods offer, as well as what limitations these methods bring if adopted within migrant entrepreneurship research. We argue that specific ethnographic practice-based methods have the capacity to reveal the rich social context of migrant entrepreneurship, which can supplement the theoretical perspectives. We adopt two illustrations to highlight the relevance of ethnographic methodologies to studying migrant entrepreneurship. The contribution this study offers is in suggesting new methods that allow fresh understanding of the complex narratives of migration dynamics to emerge. This study shows how narratives intertwine with migrants’ stories of entrepreneurship and offers guidance for future research.

A qualitative study of clinical narrative competence of medical personnel

BackgroundMedicine practiced with narrative competence is called narrative medicine, which has been proposed and used as a model of humane and effective medical practice. Despite the in-depth discussions of narrative medicine, the study of narrative competence in literature is limited; therefore, this study aims to explore the dimensions and connotations of the clinical narrative competence of medical personnel.MethodsThis qualitative study used in-depth interviews to collect participants’ experience and perspectives regarding narrative competence, followed by thematic analysis of the transcripts. Through purposive sampling, this study successfully recruited 15 participants (nine males and six females in 2018–2019) who were engaged in narrative medicine or medical humanity education from different medical schools and hospitals across Taiwan. The authors performed manual thematic analysis to identify the themes and concepts of narrative competence through a six-step theme generation process.ResultsThere were four major themes of narrative competence generalized and conceptualized: narrative horizon, narrative construction (including narrative listening, narrative understanding, narrative thinking, and narrative representation), medical relationship (including empathy, communication, affiliation, and inter-subjectivity), and narrative medical care (including responsive care, balanced act, and medical reflection). These four themes were further integrated into a conceptual framework and presented in a diagram.ConclusionsCultivating narrative competence in medical education can complement traditional biomedical orientation. Regardless of their treatment orientation, narrative medicine-informed health practitioners may take advantage of their multi-dimensional narrative competence, as presented in this article, to enhance their awareness and preparation in different areas of competence in medical services. In addition, the results of this study can be used as a framework for the development of the behavioral indicators of narrative competence, which can be taken as the basis for medical education curriculum design.

Why Binge-Watching? The Prominent Motives and Analysis of the Motivating Hedonic and Eudaimonic Elements of Emotional Gratification in a Binge-Watching Experience

Binge-watching is a popular form of media consumption, and entertainment is one of the main drivers of this activity. This research aims to examine the prominent reasons for binge-watching by re-examining the established television viewing motives, by deepening the analysis of entertainment motives, and by introducing a new possible motive – the need for narrative understanding. Therefore, the researcher combines the factors of the established television viewing motives, the factors of hedonic and eudaimonic emotional gratification in an entertainment experience and introduces the motive of the ease of following storylines. The results of an online survey with 833 participants over the age of eighteen conducted in Croatia suggest that the motives of relaxation, fun (hedonic), habit, easier following of intricate storylines, escape, and thrill (hedonic) are prominent. Eudaimonic motives are less pronounced than hedonic ones, however, these clusters are positively related, which indicates the complexity of enjoyment in binge-watching entertainment.

Locating Narrative Inquiry with Social Work

Bu çalışmanın temel amacı anlatı anlayışını ve araştırmasını tanımlayarak sosyal hizmet araştırması ve uygulaması için bir yaklaşım sunmaktır. Anlatı araştırmalarına dair yapılan literatür taramasında sosyal hizmette anlatıya dönüşün görünürlülüğü de ele alınmıştır. Felsefi köklerini postmodernizm, sosyal inşacılık, yapılandırmacılık ve feminizden alan anlatı anlayışı ve araştırmaları yaygınlaşarak, bugün hemen hemen her disiplindeki çalışmalara yansımaya başlamıştır. Bu yüzden de anlatı araştırmasının, sosyal hizmet disiplini çerçevesinde tanıtılması önem taşımaktadır. Çalışmada öncelikle deneyim, anlatı, hikaye gibi temel kavramlar bağlantısal olarak açıklanmıştır. Kavramlara dair oluşturulan anlayışın ardından anlatı araştırması, görüşme süreci, hikayenin oluşumu ve analiz biçimleri tanımlanmıştır. Son olarak ise sosyal hizmet araştırmalarında ve uygulamalarında sessizleştirilen ve ötekileştirilen bireylerle çalışma konusu meta ve karşıt anlatılar bağlamında ele alınmıştır.

The Two-Lens Approach

Abstract Over the past 30 years we have seen a welcome growth in the understanding of narrative as a complex and broadly defined set of concepts. While the complexity of children’s narrative development has been brought to light by researchers and theorists across multiple fields of study, reflecting this growth by comprehensively analyzing narrative complexity still remains a challenge. One reason for this ongoing challenge is the isolated, disparate focus of the approaches, either in analyzing solely story structure, content, or function. Few approaches combine these disparate dimensions to comprehensively analyze children’s narratives. In response, we build on research from the past 30 years to develop the Two-Lens Approach, a holistic theoretical framework for analyzing the form, content, and context of children’s narratives. This paper presents and applies this approach in an effort to start closing the gaps among the field of narrative analysis and narrative theory.

"Finding oneself after critical illness": voices from the remission society.

The number of people who survive critical illness is increasing. In parallel, a growing body of literature reveals a broad range of side-effects following intensive care treatment. Today, more attention is needed to improve the quality of survival. Based on nine individual stories of illness experiences given by participants in two focus groups and one individual interview, this paper elaborates how former critically ill patients craft and recraft their personal stories throughout their illness trajectory. The analysis was conducted from a phenomenological perspective and led to the meaning structure; a quest to find oneself after critical illness. In this structure, illness represented a breakdown of the participants' lives, forcing them to develop a new understanding of themselves. Despite acute illness, they felt safe in hospital. Coming home, however, meant a constant balancing between health and illness, and being either in or out of control. To gain a deeper understanding of the participants' narratives of survival, the meaning structure was developed from a phenomenological life world perspective, Heidegger's concept of homelikeness and Arthur Frank's typologies of illness narratives. In conclusion listening to and acknowledging the patients' lived experiences of critical illness may support the patient efforts to establish the newly defined self and hence be vital for recovery. Phenomenology is one approach facilitating care tailored to the patients' lived experience of critical illness and its aftermaths.

Fideales Erzählen

Abstract Literary theory has developed its understanding of narrative as either fictional or factual without taking into account the specific conditions of literature that is grounded in religious faith. The paper discusses the shortcomings of the dichotomy ‘fictional’/‘factual’ with regard to medieval religious literature. It argues that it is necessary to conceptualize further modes of narration in order to describe adequately the historical and global plurality of story-telling. The concept of “fideal narrative” is introduced in order to specify the pragmatic and epistemological conditions of religious literature. Its historical validity is tested in a comparison of the prologues of historiographer and hagiographer William of Malmesbury.

Familiarity of characters promotes understanding of narrative

Familiarity of characters promotes understanding of narrative

“Hell You Talmbout?” Sighting confusion in the performance of Black Revolt

This essay considers how “confusion” shapes narrative strategies and understandings of the 1811 Uprising in Louisiana and how artistic practice, performance, and amateur documentation differently refract public memory-making of the uprising and its brutal response. Here confusion also maps the relations between reenactment, the reenactors, and the practice and politics of abolitionist imagination.

Dust Covered Privilege: White Women’s Experiences of the Dust Bowl

In this article, I utilize a white privilege framework to analyze white women’s experiences of the Dust Bowl. In particular, I focus on the question: What do white women’s experiences of the Dust Bowl tell us about privilege and inequality? Using oral histories housed in the University of Oklahoma’s archive, “Dust, Drought, and Dreams Gone Dry: Oklahoma Women in the Dust Bowl Oral History Project,” I engage in a qualitative analysis of the women’s experiences that expand our understanding of the dominant narratives of this era. By focusing on the anomalous nature of the sample, I examine the multifaceted way in which race, gender, and class shape these women’s experiences of this era. Ultimately, these women’s narratives reveal the complex system of privilege and oppression that these white women experienced in a time of economic and environmental crisis.

Significance of Place in the Lives of Recreation Practitioners

This paper is a narrative inquiry into the experiences of two recreation practitioners, as well as the author, as they each learned how to live in relationally ethical ways in recreation practice. By drawing on the field texts of the author as he participated in a community garden project as a researcher-practitioner over two years, this paper shows that place matters when contemplating how lives come together in recreation practice. The purpose of this paper is to show that place is part of the fabric of our relational space as practitioner and participants lives come together in the meeting place of a recreation program. Place shapes who we are and are becoming, particularly when it is understood simultaneously with temporality and sociality (i.e., a narrative understanding of place).

Enseñar a argumentar en la escuela secundaria

Diversas investigaciones en diferentes contextos educativos han evidenciado las dificultades de los estudiantes de escuelas secundarias para comprender textos de cierta complejidad y para fundamentar la propia postura ante diversos contenidos disciplinares. En Argentina, los estudios se han focalizado en estudios diagnósticos sobre la comprensión de textos narrativos y expositivos, pero no en los efectos de la implementación de propuestas didácticas que favorezcan la comprensión y producción de textos argumentativos. En este artículo, se sintetizan los resultados de una investigación colaborativa, realizada en una escuela secundaria pública del noroeste argentino, cuyo objetivo fue el diseño, implementación y evaluación de estrategias didácticas que priorizan el desarrollo de prácticas argumentativas dialógicas para promover el pensamiento crítico -en sentido amplio- (Paul y Elder, 2003), en el aprendizaje de la Filosofía. Se triangularon resultados obtenidos de tres fuentes de datos: producciones estudiantiles, perspectivas de los estudiantes y del docente, y las secuencias didácticas implementadas.

“First You Feast with Your Eyes:” An Aesthetic Approach to Food and Risk

ABSTRACT Ideas surrounding risk, especially as it relates to health behaviors, contribute substantially to our understandings of health and wellbeing. However, more than being a way to forecast future behavior, risk is also a social construction rooted in narrative understanding and experiential behaviors. In this essay I seek to extend current scholarship on risk through an emphasis on aesthetic sensibilities. Relying on discourse from an ethnographic study of a nonprofit organized to address food insecurity, I examine participant communication surrounding their food behaviors (i.e. preparation, purchasing, and consumption) to illustrate the ways that participants approached risk aesthetically. I conclude with a discussion of theoretical implications, arguing that the act of accessing risk is itself an aesthetic endeavor.

Notions of Atmosphere: Toward the Limits of Narrative Understanding

The change of methodological paradigms, introduced by postclassical narratology and especially its cognitivist orientation, has thus far not reflected on the phenomenon of atmosphere. This is somewhat surprising, if we consider that the contemporary conceptualization of atmosphere and the increased interest in the questions it brings forth arise from new phenomenology and phenomenological aesthetics, fields that have directly initiated the development of postclassical narratology. Starting with the phenomenological concept of atmosphere of M. Merleau-Ponty and H. Schmitz (atmosphere as an ecstasy of experience, a specific modus of presence with a quasi-objective and inter-subjective status fitting into the extra-linguistic framework, atmospheric perception as seizing the surfaceless space) and the aesthetic relevance of the concept (G. Böhme, T. Griffero, E. Fischer-Lichte), this article presents the terminological instability and semantic vagueness of atmosphere and related terms within the narratological discourse of M. Bal, G. Prince, M.L. Ryan and P. Abbott (atmosphere as receptive and narrative disposition, the accompanying factor of morphological categories, the thematic-psychological distinctive characteristic of genre). The primary objective of the paper is to reexamine the methodological legitimacy of the concept of atmosphere, both regarding the limits of narrative understanding and its interpretative potential which might become relevant within cognitive theories of intertextuality (E. Panagiotidy, M. Juvan), while also being a humanistic response to the challenges of new epistemological paradigms and a return to the transcendental essence of literature.

Design for the New School of the Anthropocene

This paper is concerned with the planning of the New School of the Anthropocene, an experimental Arts and Humanities college between Cambridge and London. It discusses the ethos of its radical part-time degree curriculum dedicated to the fusion of critical enquiry and creative practice, and posits an alternative non-managerialist model of the student-teacher relationship that might counter the instrumentalism of a neo-liberal “outputs” culture and the market-bureaucratisation of British HE institutions. It goes on to broach the transdisciplinary nature of its curriculum, which addresses the omission of Humanities disciplines in the consideration of climate emergency and mass extinction through fostering an understanding and reexamination of the cultural narratives and metaphors that shape the human location on earth.

Spatiotemporal mapping of evacuee response

SummaryThe analysis of evacuee behaviour and performance requires data on human behaviour from actual fire incidents. Unfortunately, such data is rarely collected and, if available, is often provided in different formats and levels of refinement, and does not provide sufficient narrative understanding. The lack of a standardized approach to collecting and reporting such data hinders our understanding of human behaviour in fire, theory development, as well as incident analysis and communication. In other fields, graphical notation systems are used to report events in a quick, reliable and standardized manner. This article outlines the development of a notation system that aims to better document evacuee performance. The proposed notation system is then applied to two historic case studies—the Knights of Columbus fire of 1942 and the Beverly Hills Supper Club fire of 1977—to illustrate the approach. Finally, limitations and future research needs of the presented notation system are discussed.

Cross-codal integration of bridging-event information in narrative understanding

Visual narratives communicate event sequences by using different code systems such as pictures and texts. Thus, comprehenders must integrate information from different codalities. This study addressed such cross-codal integration processes by investigating how the codality of bridging-event information (i.e., pictures, text) affects the understanding of visual narrative events. In Experiment 1, bridging-event information was either present (as picture or text) or absent (i.e., not shown). The viewing times for the subsequent picture depicting the end state of the action were comparable within the absent and the text conditions. Further, the viewing times for the end-state picture were significantly longer in the text condition as compared to the pictorial condition. In Experiment 2, we tested whether replacing bridging-event information with a blank panel increases viewing times in a way similar to the text condition. Bridging event information was either present (as picture) or absent (not shown vs. blank panel). The results replicated Experiment 1. Additionally, the viewing times for the end-state pictures were longest in the blank condition. In Experiment 3, we investigated the costs related to integrating information from different codalities by directly comparing the text and picture conditions with the blank condition. The results showed that the distortion caused by the blank panel is larger than the distortion caused by cross-codal integration processes. Summarizing, we conclude that cross-codal information processing during narrative comprehension is possible but associated with additional mental effort. We discuss the results with regard to theories of narrative understanding.