Navigating Stories in Times of Transition

This project aimed to develop eScience technologies to advance multidisciplinary approaches of digital storytelling. When societal transitions happen, people respond by telling stories that create continuity and change. In a digital age, storytelling has become even more abundant, rich in variety, and accelerating in pace. These stories have an important impact on how societies deal with sudden change and disruption, like in the Covid-19 pandemic. In a multidisciplinary team, we aimed to analyze how stories about the pandemic evolve over time. To this end, we developed the Story Navigator. The Story Navigator aims to extract relevant information about the basic plot structure including five narrative components: (1) scenes, in which (2) agents (3) act (4) with particular agency (5) to reach a particular purpose. Researchers can take the relations between these components into account when interpreting the meaning of stories. The goal of the Story Navigator is therefore to support human interpretation with available computational tools, rather than allowing for a purely computational approach. The Story Navigator is integrated in the Orange datamining platform. This platform with visual tools (widgets) that can be connected in workflows for data analysis. This allows the Story Navigator to be used by researchers in the fields of Humanities and Social Sciences who do not have expertise in coding and programming. The Story Navigator is made available on a dedicated webpage that supports users in installing and using it in Orange. The website also includes a collection of tutorials that provide a stepwise description of the Story Navigator in answering specific research questions. The Story Navigator is also available on GitHub for programmers who want to further develop the tools.