Set Of Narratives Research Articles

When Silence Creates Memory: Performed Communities in Nineteenth-century Spanish and French Commemorations

Recently, the Third Phase in memory studies has challenged traditional concepts of memory that conceived it to be a concrete image or narrative set within a fixed moment and, consequently, neglect its changeable dimension and malleability. Focusing on a constructed narrative of the past, scholars have renewed the theoretical and methodological basis of this analytical field. This study adopts this new conceptualisation to analyse the intertwining of memory and silence in official commemorations during the regencies of María Cristina (1833–40) and Espartero (1840–43) in Spain and the July Monarchy (1830–48) in France. Its main contribution is to show that a deliberate omission of a narrative cannot only be linked to oblivion and can even become a space for creating memory.

Data Curation and Cartographic Narratives on Indigenous Circulation Networks in the Orinoco Region: Methodological Reflections on the Project Inventar Colombia

Inventar Colombia: una mirada desde el Orinoco is a digital research project that seeks to reconstruct aspects of the geographic imagination, forms of relationship with nature and its resources, of at least 15 Indigenous groups that inhabited the Orinoco region between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries. Responding to the limits to what we can know in the archive about the ways in which various Indigenous groups inhabited and conceived the territory, we carried out a process of curation and extraction of geospatial data in historical and archaeological sources. We identified some patterns of territorial occupation and exchange networks of the multiplicity of Indigenous communities that have inhabited the Orinoco region. From iterations for the construction of maps with QGIS and typical GIS conventions, we explored other forms of visualization and narrative construction to deploy the arguments of the research on the web. We proposed a CSM-free web interface developed with JavaScript and open-source libraries and developed a set of cartographic narratives.

SSKG: Subject stream knowledge graph, a new approach for event detection from text

Events play a crucial role in shaping societal meaning and discourse. They are recorded in text data streams from social networks or online sources and analyzing them is vital for predicting and managing future occurrences. Methods for event detection from text data streams have been developed to enhance accuracy and efficiency in analyzing large datasets. This study focuses on events published as text data streams in Telegram. Two main perspectives are considered for better results: firstly, major events can overshadow the detection of smaller ones with fewer narrative instances. Secondly, due to diverse narratives surrounding each event, establishing meaningful connections between narrative sets is essential. In this research, two new concepts, “subject stream” and “stream graph,” are introduced. The subject stream aims to process topics to mitigate the impact of bursty events on detecting others. The stream graph models data stream and identifies various narratives associated with each event for better identification and categorization. Combining these approaches accurately represents events and their characteristics in the real world. Implementing the system in three versions demonstrates the effectiveness of using the “stream graph” alongside the “subject stream,” resulting in improved execution speed and accuracy. Evaluation results show a 6% enhancement in topic recall.

Archtypology of the Figural Antagonist in Classical Fairy Tales and Other Culture-Forming Stories

The present study focuses on the semiotic profile of a literary character acting as a villain/antagonist (Propp) as one of the central factors of the existential problem situation (the de facto “originator” of problems), which represents a general theme in the folk fairy tales and/or culture-forming stories. The aim of this paper is neither to cover all the principles and manifestations of antagonists exhaustively, nor to present a complete typological description of antagonistic characters, but to cover those basic forms and most frequent or otherwise essential attributes that canonically standardize and significantly universalize the archetype of an antagonist in the selected range of narratives. The issue is approached from the perspective of literary theory (with an emphasis on the morphological, structural, and thematic analysis of the literary characters), and it is materially and argumentatively based on the representative sets of folklore and culture-forming narratives (Aarne-Thompson-Uther’s international catalog of fairy tale types, world myths, canonical texts, etc.), as well as on their national (Slovak) variants.

Paratextual mediation and (re)framed narratives: a case study of Ganxiao liuji

ABSTRACT Translation is not merely a textual transformation but involves paratextual mediation. Linking Genette's notion of paratext to Baker's narrative theory, this paper examines Yang Jiang's Ganxiao liuji, a personal narrative set during the Cultural Revolution but focusing on everyday occurrences, to uncover how three publishing houses mediate paratextual materials (titles, prefaces, blurbs, notes and afterwords, and visual images) in their translations of this book, and what larger narratives are (re)framed and reinforced in this process. It discloses that while the Hong Kong publishing house prioritises the original personal narrative content and style in its paratextual presentation, its American counterparts foreground the political background while overshadowing Yang's personal narrative and reframing it as part of the larger narratives of a repressive, inhumane China with an authoritarian government and suppressed masses. Such mediation responds to and reinforces Western narratives of the problematic, dystopic China, and directs readers to understand it through a skewed angle, thereby perpetuating established stereotypes of this non-Western country. This research further unveils how paratextual mediation resonates with and contributes to the larger narratives circulating beyond the immediate text, guiding receivers into (re)framed narratives which impact their perceptions and behaviour in the society, and ultimately shape the social world.

Strategic culture and its (re)construction: What role for narratives and othering?

Strategic culture has been studied to explain patterns of behavior focusing thereby almost exclusively on the impact of culture held by decision makers on strategic choices. This preoccupation with the culture-behavior nexus has resulted in overlooking the questions about the (re)construction of strategic culture and presuming it as historically given, out there, and self-evident. This article shifts the focus to the (re)construction of strategic culture and brings in narratives and othering as discursive practices that (re)construct strategic culture. By bridging strategic culture, narration, and othering, it demonstrates that strategic culture is not out there and self-evident but a set of narratives with elements of othering that constitutes and transmits distinct meanings about the self and others, and their interactions through particular storylines which frame strategic thinking as well as appropriate policy means and ends.

A Comparison of Stephen Harper’s and Justin Trudeau’s Arctic Narratives: Toward a New Geography of the Canadian North

This article intends to compare the political narratives on the Canadian Artic produced by the governments of Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper (2006–2015) and Liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau (2015–2023), with a specific focus on the identity dimension of these two sets of political narratives. Harper’s Arctic narrative, served by a unique personal commitment of the PM, promoted a radical shift from the historic Canada centred on the Laurentian region to a new Arctic Canada and in so doing, created a new political geography of Canada. In Justin Trudeau’s Arctic narrative, priority was given to reconciliation through the development of state-to-state relations with Indigenous communities. Embodied by the person of Governor General Mary Simon and concretized by the cooperative approach of Trudeau’s Arctic and Northern Framework, this new agentivity of Northern Indigenous peoples has ushered in a new decolonial geography of the Arctic. Unexpectedly, these successive official narratives of Arctic Canada have proven complementary in striving to move the center of gravity of the country north, thus creating new perspectives on Canadian identity and political geography.

“Gilead is within you”: A Theocratic Narrative Setting of Cultural memory in Atwood’s The Testaments

This article attempts to explore the synthetic relationship between group identities and their effects on cultural memory in Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments. It will investigate how Atwood’s dystopian fiction conspicuously weaves threads of cultural identity in the totalitarian society. While examining the work, the researchers found three forms of Memory Figures channelizing society: Architecture and time, Identical groupings, and Language. With significant attention to the prequel, The Handmaid’s Tale, this article will consider The Testaments for the dissection of hard-wired cultural memory formation. This article focuses on how a politically unsettled society of Gilead, through its Memory Figures, inscribes a cultural narrative while instructing individual memories. Atwood’s usage of these Memory Figures to achieve a theocratic regime has been scrutinized in this article. The Architecture of Gilead was given an intrusive wall of glass, where the symbol of eyes prevails, to externalize the surveillance of God on each one of its citizens, thereby forming a cultural memory of subjectivity. To make the citizens identify with groups, this theocratic regime specifies roles to citizens according to their rank for men and according to reproductive efficiency for women. Keeping in view the relevance of language in forming cultural memory, Atwood prescribed a set of greetings such as ‘under his eyes,’ and ‘praise be’ to make profound imprints on the individual memory of citizens, which has been discussed in the study. These three Memory Figures simultaneously form collective memory imprints on the citizens of Gilead, which in time became inherent cultural memories. This article explores how, by politicizing the issue of cultural memory in The Testaments, Atwood taps into the agency of people and establishes language control (communicative) to form the cultural memory narrative.

A Trinitarian Ascent: How Augustine’s Sermons on the Psalms of Ascent Transform the Ascent Tradition

Augustine’s sermons on the Psalms of Ascent, part of the Enarrationes in Psalmos, are a unique entry in the venerable tradition of those writings that aim to help us ascend to a higher reality. These sermons transform the ascent genre by giving, in the place of the Platonic account of ascent, a Christian ascent narrative with a Trinitarian structure. Not just the individual ascends, but the community that is the church, the body of Christ, also ascends. The ascent is up to God, the Idipsum or the Selfsame, the ultimate reality, confessed by the church as God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. Through the grace of the Incarnation, God the Son enables us to ascend, making himself the way of ascent from the humility we must imitate at the beginning of the ascent all the way up to Heaven, where he retains his identity as Idipsum. Meanwhile, the Holy Spirit works in the ascending church to convert our hearts to the love of God and neighbor. I review the Platonic ascent tradition in Plato’s Republic and Plotinus’ Enneads; overview ascent in some of Augustine’s earlier writings; introduce the narrative setting of the sermons on the Psalms of Ascent; and analyze the Trinitarian structure of their ascent narrative. I close with some reflections on the difference between a preached Trinitarianism that encourages ascent and a more academic effort to understand God such as we find in Augustine’s de Trinitate.

Farming in the shadow of violent organizations: understanding farmers’ relational place-making in socio-ecological crises

AbstractThis study investigates how farmers develop place-based relations when subject to structural conditions of violence and environmental crime. We particularly focus on environmental crimes perpetrated by the Camorra, the Neapolitan Mafia, at the expense of farming communities in the metropolitan areas of Naples and Caserta, in Italy. Farmers located in this area have struggled to mobilize collectively, with only a group of farmers enable to re-act to land exploitation, illegal burning or dumping, and more in general to the waste crisis. Stimulated by this rather puzzling empirical evidence, our research team engaged in a deeper investigation of the waste crisis, exploring how farmers located in the Land of Fires reacted to conditions of violence and environmental crime by developing a differentiated set of place-based narratives and practices. Using the Land of Fires and the waste crisis as an empirical context, in this study we focus particularly on conceptualizing place-based processes emerging in the context of organized violence and environmental crime. In our approach, these are structural conditions produced by the Camorra and the state, to which local agencies, such as farmers, respond.

Analyzing Reddit Data: Hybrid Model for Depression Sentiment using FastText Embedding

Depression, a prevalent mental condition globally, exerts a substantial influence on various aspects of human cognition, emotions, and behaviour. The alarming increase in deaths attributable to depression over the past few years demonstrates the imperative need to address this problem through prevention and treatment interventions. In the era of thriving social media platforms, which have a significant impact on society and psychological aspects, these platforms have become a means for people to convey their emotions and experiences openly. Reddit stands out among these platforms as a significant place. The main aim of this study is to examine the feasibility of forecasting individuals' mental states by classifying Reddit articles on depression and non-depression. This work aims to employ deep learning algorithms and word embeddings to analyze the textual and semantic settings of narratives to detect symptoms of depression. The study effectively employed a BiLSTM-BiGRU model that applied FastText word embeddings. The BiLSTM-BiGRU model analyzes information bidirectionally, detecting correlations in sequential data. It's suitable for tasks dependent on input order or addressing data uncertainties. The Reddit dataset, featuring text concerning depression, achieved an accuracy score of 97.03% and an F1 score of 97.02%.

Existe-t-il des topoï spécifiques aux animaux ?

<p>Are they any animal topoi, or are they merely pre-existing topoi that include animals through anthropomorphisation? The aim of this paper is to extend Sator's reflections on the birdsongs of the fables, which are at once zoological observations, toposemes and typemes. The analysis will focus on the Roman de Renart, the Fables de La Fontaine and the Scènes de la vie privée et publique des animaux, three sets of short narratives in which the animals at the centre are sometimes the narrators. There are several reasons for this choice of texts: the variety of narrative situations and species represented, both wild and domestic, and a certain homogeneity in the ideological context of each work.</p><p>After a preliminary survey of the first Satorbase, I will analyse the narrative and topical treatment of situations specific to animals (eating, noises, migrations) before observing the most frequent topoi (such as tricking the trickster, hunger, an assembly of animals chooses a king or a representative), their narrative configurations and any variations.</p><p>This topical examination will provide an opportunity to consider the status of animals in society: do the topoi reflect these changes? do they incorporate new animals? are they influenced by the gradual emergence of pets in the bourgeoisie?</p>

Measuring Chinese economic sanctions 1949–2020: Introducing the China TIES dataset

Research on China's use of economic sanctions has proliferated in recent decades, yet coverage of Chinese sanctions in existing sanctions datasets is both inconsistent and incomplete. This article introduces both a new dataset on sanctions involving China and a research framework for expanding knowledge about non-Western economic sanctions more generally. The Chinese Economic Sanctions dataset (aka China TIES) includes 135 episodes where China is the sender and 88 episodes where it is the target from 1949 to 2020. Over 70% of our cases were not captured by the existing datasets. We use the Threat and Imposition of Economic Sanctions dataset (TIES v.4) as a baseline for identifying and coding sanctions episodes and provide a set of standardized narratives documenting each episode with secondary sources. The result is a dataset that is interoperable with TIES but also contains new variables that better capture the informal nature of many Chinese sanctions. We describe the dataset, paying special attention to the ways Chinese sanctions differ from other senders, and we present descriptive statistics for some of the key variables, highlighting the evolution of China's sanctions use over time.

Voices from the Other Side: Exploring Nonhuman Agents and Their Narrative Function in the Zhuangzi

In the history of Chinese literature, the Zhuangzi authors were the first to grant a voice to diverse forms of life, among them a snake, a tree, a dead man, a divine turtle, and even the wind. What exactly is the interest of incorporating nonhuman protagonists in brief literary fictions? Was there something at stake when trying out this pioneering narrative technique, or was it just for the sake of literary innovation and entertainment? Through a detailed analysis of a set of concise narratives, this study uncovers a consistent critique of the religious institutions (chiefly divination and sacrifice), as well as the economic practices prevalent during the Warring States period. It aims to demonstrate that the Zhuangzi's comprehensive critique of the Zhou cultural order achieves its “hearability” through a recurrent use of striking dualities, including day and night, dream and wakefulness, and humans and nonhumans. A heretofore silent and passive community of living beings raises its voice and is able to challenge the well-established discourse proclaiming human sovereignty over the natural world. These voices and the themes they raise serve, among other things, as a literary strategy intended to illuminate the universality of violence and the criminal essence of human culture (wen 文).

NarrativePlay: An Automated System for Crafting Visual Worlds in Novels for Role-Playing

In this demo, we present NarrativePlay -- an innovative system enabling users to role-play a fictional character and interact with dynamically generated narrative environments. Unlike existing predefined sandbox approaches, NarrativePlay centres around the main storyline events extracted from the narrative, allowing users to experience the story from the perspective of a character they chose. To design versatile AI agents for diverse scenarios, we employ a framework built on a Large Language Models (LLMs) to extract detailed character traits from text. We also incorporate automatically generated visual displays of narrative settings, character portraits, and character speech, greatly enhancing the overall user experience.

On the concept of the regional religious brand: The veneration and pilgrimage of Saint John Vladimir and new pathways for religious tourism

AbstractBuilding on the concept of regional branding, the paper seeks to pave new ground by delving into the novel concept of a ‘regional religious brand.’ As a new term in religious tourism, the ‘regional religious brand’ defines the function of distinguishing a spiritual value offered in a region as a concept and reality, containing a name, an iconography, a set of images, a pilgrimage, narratives, a slogan, visions, and symbols. After arguing that the territory of the former Archdiocese of Ohrid still qualifies as a region, we engage in one of the region's spiritual symbols, the veneration and pilgrimage of Saint John Vladimir and suggest a concrete pilgrimage route stemming from this regional religious brand.

Analysis of Anonymous Student Narratives About Experiences with Emergency Medicine Residency Programs.

Academic emergency medicine (EM) communities have viewed anonymous online communities (AOC) such as Reddit or specialty-specific "applicant spreadsheets" as poor advising resources. Despite this, robust EM AOCs exist, with large user bases and heavy readership. Insights about applicants' authentic experiences can be critical for applicants and program leadership decision-making. To date, there are no EM studies to qualitatively assess EM AOC narratives during the application cycle. Our goal was to perform a qualitative analysis of students' EM program experiences through a publicly available AOC. This was a qualitative analysis of a publicly available, time-stamped, user-locked AOC dataset: "Official 2020-2021 Emergency Medicine Applicant Spreadsheet." We extracted and then de-identified all data from selected sub-sheets entitled "Virtual Interview Impressions" and "Rotation Impressions." Four investigators used constant comparative method to analyze the data inductively, and they subsequently met to generate common themes discussed by students. Preliminary thematic analysis was conducted on a random sample of 37/183 (20%) independent narratives to create the initial codebook. This was used and updated iteratively to analyze the entire narrative set consisting of 841 discrete statements. Finally, two unique codes were created to distinguish whether the identified sub-themes, or program attributes, were likely "modifiable" or "non-modifiable." We identified six major themes: living and working conditions; interpersonal relationships; learning experiences, postgraduate readiness, and online/virtual supplements. Common sub-themes included patient population (13%); resident personality (7%); program leadership personality (7%); relationship with faculty/leadership (6%); geography (4%); practice setting (4%); program reputation (4%), and postgraduate year-3 experiences (4%). Modifiable sub-themes outnumbered non-modifiable sub-themes, 60.7% to 39.3%. In this analysis of selected medical students' narratives in an AOC, the majority of identified themes represented topics that may serve as external feedback for EM residency programs and their clerkships. Selective use of AOCs may set a precedent for future program assessments by applicants and inform program leadership of important programmatic elements in the eyes of applicants. It elucidates important themes in their interactions or learning experiences with programs and creates opportunities for learner-centric program improvement.

“It was just so hard”: ineffable <em>just</em> as a mixed expressive

A highly productive debate has arisen over the past two decades concerning the division of labor between semantics and pragmatics in building meaning (Potts 2005; Kennedy and McNally 2005; Sauerland 2012; Roberts 2012; Coppock and Beaver 2014; Gutzmann 2019 i.a.). In this article we illustrate the depth of integration of context-independent and context-dependent meaning through a close analysis of the exclusive operator (EO) just. Recent accounts of the many distinct guises of EO just have proposed a unified shared function: quantification over sets of alternatives (Horn 2000; Orenstein 2015; Wiegand/Windhearn 2017, 2021; Beltrama 2021). We identify here an entirely new surface manifestation of just in the StoryListening Corpus (a set of bereavement narratives elicited during the COVID-19 pandemic), which we term ‘ineffability just’ and argue it serves as a mixed expressive (McCready 2010; Gutzmann 2012). It encodes both descriptive content as a new flavor of exclusive operator (Beltrama 2021), and simultaneously expressive content (Potts 2005, 2007) signaling that the speaker is at a loss for words in the moment to describe an experience more completely because of their affective response to its profound nature.

The Strategic Use of Narratives and Governance of the COVID-19 Pandemic in Major Autocratisers in Europe

ABSTRACT By the end of 2022, scholars had published heavily on authoritarian consolidation at the time of COVID-19 and explored how governments adopted measures weakening democratic checks and balances yet strengthened their regimes during the COVID crisis. Yet, we do not know much about how political leaders narrated the pandemic in their domestic and foreign policy choices in a way that reinforces their power. By focusing on the major autocratisers in Europe (Hungary, Poland, Turkey, and Serbia) whose democracy scores have fallen the most over the last 10 years, we reveal a set of influential narratives identified in the discourses of state leaders and government representatives which were constructed around the governance of the COVID-19 pandemic. These narratives were utilized by political leaders to legitimize their repressive policies geared towards controlling the society, and to contest the European Union (EU) in particular and the liberal democratic order in general.

Resignifying Silence

The article constructed so far seeks, above all, to document a set of narratives through oral accounts gathered from interviews, recognizing them as an integral part of the resulting process - writing. These narratives present to the readers the experiences lived by professionals immersed in a moment of chaos and a state of global health emergency. The primary objective is to document all that has been experienced through these narratives, but not only that; it is understood that by creating spaces for dialogue, one can better shape the paths for the professional’s performance, exercise, and enhancement of their training in focus.