Sidebar: Family and childhood photos

These photographs date from 1917 to the late 1940s, and include pictures of Nancybelle's grandparents, aunts, uncles cousin and sister. One section features photographs of Nancy and her sister taken by legendary photographer James Vanderzee.

The music is from La Boheme -- Nancybelle's favorite opera. She often heard opera on the radio during her childhood. The singer is Enrico Caruso.

Clip: Steven Fullwood on African American gay life in the mid-20th century

Clip: How Liz Claiborne treated employees

Clip:"Everything was functional"

Clip: Michelle Tourse on Elder Nancybelle

Kevin Michael Brooks: Metalinear Narrative

The term metalinear narrative is used here to define a method for creating and developing multiple linear narratives from a highly structured collection of small narrative pieces, thus creating a new story form. These narrative pieces on their own do not constitute a single narrative or plotline, such as a chronological spine, but instead act as building blocks for constructing many different narratives. This new type of story defines a form which transcends linear in the sense that it is a form from which many linear stories can be made, therefore metalinear...

Source

Clip: Advice for aspiring fashion industry professionals

Trailer for "Fashioned by Love: The Life of Nancybelle Valentine"

Limitations of the Holovaty model

As I noted Holovaty maintains that what journalists do is collect, organize and deliver information, and that much of that process can be automated.

Holovaty has applied that principle to a number of notable projects. However, he ackowledges that there is still a place for storytelling:

An article -- a "big blob of text" -- is often the best way to explain concepts. The nuances of the English language do not map neatly to machine-manipulatable data sources. (This very entry, which you're reading right now, is a prime example of something that could not be replaced with a database.) When I say "newspapers need to stop the story-centric worldview," I don't mean "newspapers need to abolish stories." The two forms of information dissemination can coexist and complement each other.

Holovaty's concepets are most powerfully applied to the informational aspects of journalism, but reading Lule makes it clear that the most common straight news story may have a cultural meaning that transcends the facts of a single story. Holovaty uses a common staple of local news -- the fire story -- to make his point about structured data. The typical fire story might read:

"Two children were killed and a firefighter was seriously injured when fire tore through a row home on the South Side early this morning. The children's mother and two other children escaped the blaze, but flames and smoke prevented firefighters from reaching 7-year-old Tom Smith and his 5-year-old sister Tina, who were sleeping in a rear bedroom. They were pronounced dead at the scene.

"Fire Commissioner Lex Luthor said the cause of the blaze is still being investigated, but a hallway space heater may be to blame. He said the smoke detectors in the house appear to have been in working order. The two-alarm probably started around 3:30 AM, and was declared under control by 4:30.

"Firefigher Tess Truehart was overcome by smoke inhalation when she tried to rescue Tom and Tina. She was taken to Lakeland Hospital where she is listed in serious condition. The children's mother, Tonya Smith, 30, was able to carry 3-year old Terrance and 1-year-old Tyrone out of the burnning house, but firefighters prevented her from returning for the other two children. The three survivors were also taken to Parkland, where they are in good condition.

Smith's husband, Thomas Smith, Sr., 31, rushed home from his job at a nearby bakery when he saw smoke coming from the direction of his house...."

About this type of story, Holovaty says,

"I really want to be able to do is explore the raw facts of that story, one by one, with layers of attribution, and an infrastructure for comparing the details of the fire -- date, time, place, victims, fire station number, distance from fire department, names and years experience of firemen on the scene, time it took for firemen to arrive -- with the details of previous fires. And subsequent fires, whenever they happen."

But both Lule and Mitch Stephens would likely note that such a rendering, while valuable, strips the story of its cultural worth. Beyond the bare facts of this case, there is tragedy, heroism and caprice. A database that scooped up the details of this fire from fire and police reports and organized it in the way Holovaty suggests would perform great service to people looking trying to assess the effectiveness of fire-prevention efforts, for example.

But people who know the Smith and families, or who live nearby, will probably want more. And depending on other things that might be going on in the community (for example, the frequency of fires, or the status of female firefighters), the story might assume complexities that lend themselves to narrative.

As I proceed to work on tools for automating aspects of narrative journalism, I don't want to lose sight of these limitations.

The Hero Myth

(Click on the image to enlarge)


According to Lule, the hero exhibits characteristics that the larger culture wants to promote.

Jack Lule's Seven Master Myths

According to Lule, journalists tend to invoke one of seven master myths in constructing their stories. Lule's book Daily News, Eternal Stories, Guilford, 2001) traces these myths in stories from the New York Times published during the 1980s and 90s. Lule delineates these meta-narratives parially order to call attention to the biases they may encode.

For example, stories about Mother Teresa cast her in the role of the selfless Good Mother -- a narrative frame that excluded facts that might make her appear less sympathetic. Conversely, stories about controversial boxer Mike Tyson invoked the Trickster myth, making him seem less than human.

However, Lule's larger purpose is to argue that the journalists who cast news in these mythical terms are invoking older stories that serve essential cultural functions.

The Victim
The Hero
The Good Mother
The Scapegoat
The Trickster
The Other World
The Flood

Defining terms for the sake of classification

Narrative terms

Linear: Conventional narrative structure with a beginning, middle, end and a pre-determined outcome.

Interactive: According to Chris Crawford,

"The experience of interactive storytelling differs substantially from that of a conventional linear story. A linear story 'runs on rails' from start to finish in the most powerful and expeditious manner possible. The interactive storytelling experience meanders through a dramatic universe of possibilities. It lacks the sense of directed inevitability that gives conventional stories such power. It is like a butterfly flitting across a meadow, not a hawk plummeting down on its prey. The closest form of traditional storytelling is the soap opera, which concentrates on the relationships among the characters rather than the particulars of plots."

Meta-linear
Non-linear
Multi-threaded
Procedural

Throughline
Archetypal narrative

Journalism terms

Journalism
Narrative journalism: See New Journalism
Hard News
Feature
Lede
Newspeg
Transitions
BBIS (Boring but important information)
Exposition
Closure
Call to Action

Tech terms

Agent
AI
Logic
Microformats
Natural language promising
Semantic web

Statement of Need: Why attempt to translate literary journalism into a dynamic format?

The dizzying pace of technological, cultural and economic change that has engulfed the news industry. Melissa Ludkte, editor of Nieman Reports, put it this way in the introduction to their Winter, 2006 issue, "Goodbye, Gutenberg:"

"Journalism is on a fast-paced, transformative journey, its destination still unknown. That the Web and other media technologies are affecting mightily the practice of journalism is beyond dispute. Less clear is any shared vision of what the future holds."

When it comes to storytelling, one school of thought is that literary journalism is fast becoming a casualty of change. Jan Schaeffer, executive director of J-lab, an incubator for journalism innovation, told members of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communications that one of the problems in journalism education is that, "We reward long-form storytellers and feature writing, even though a lot of newspapers and even magazines don’t run long stories or features." Parodoxically, she noted that citizens feel "rage over the crumbling American narrative."

At the same time, the authors of the canonical text, The Elements of Journalism: What Newspeople Should Know and What the Public Should Expect insist that sharing news through storytelling will continue to fulfill a vital human and cultural need.

There is however, a tension between this need and the strengths of Internet-based publishing technologies, best highlighted by the work of journalist-programmer Adrian Holovaty. Holovaty's development of interactive news databases such as ChicagoCrime.org represent a fundamental re-thinking of what it means to deliver the news. Holovaty argues that, stripped to its essence, journalism is the process of collecting, structuring and presenting information, and that much of that process can be automated, if news organizations are willing to "stop the story-centric worldview."

Indeed, tagging, linking, commenting and blogging allow news consumers to select and recontextualize stories to suit their interests. Amy Gahran reports that new tools such as Joey and Zude to contextualize web content according to their tastes.

However, advances in game design technology as well as emerging web standards such microformats suggest that there may be ways of structuring narratives that are compatible with interactive databases. In addition, young people embrace games that pay attention to storytelling in the way that previous generations embraced books and film.

The hope, therefore, is that dynamic, nonfiction storytelling can attract a generation of gamers and thus deepen their understanding of and engagement with issues of the day.

Introduction to the Nancybelle Project

This weblog is part of a research project in multi-threaded storytelling conducted by Kim Pearson in collaboration with Ursula Wolz.

The Research Project

We seek to discover whether it is possible to create a storytelling engine that provides users with an immersive, multimedia experience of a non-fiction narrative. The life story of Nancybelle Valentine, a retired design pattern-maker who played a key role in the early years of the Liz Claiborne Corporation will serve as a prototype narrative.

The goal of the Nancybelle project is to create a new form of scriptwriting for interactive, database-driven journalistic narratives. My method is an iterative re-visioning of a magazine profile as a dynamic multimedia presentation. I am using a prototype story that would normally be suited to a magazine feature, but is of sufficient complexity and depth that it can be constructed along several story threads.

There will be multiple story threads that will serve as points of narration. The writing method that I am working to create will integrate the conventions of journalistic storytelling with the structural requirements of database content, for incorporation into a storytelling engine being developed by my colleague Ursula Wolz, a computational linguist and veteran game developer.

Using this method, I posit that users are likely to achieve a level of reader engagement with complex nonfiction narrative that is comparable to what readers experience from reading literary nonfiction in print. The goal is not to supplant print literary journalism, but to complement it by creating a genre suited to media consumers entranced by videogames and social media. Further, because the tools and techniques to flow from this project will allow news consumers to easily experience a story from multiple vantage points, it should facilitate civic engagement by immersing readers in evocative stories told from more than one point of view. I also believe that this form of storytelling will have applications for educational simulations.

Evolution

This project began in early 2005 as a conventional, web-based narrative, based on interviews conducted with Ms. Valentine in Spring, 2005. Two students from The College of New Jersey, Robert Burnett and Kerby Vincent, served as my photographer and research assistant, respectively. Charlene Rivers and Steven Thomas shot additional video and still images. However, readings on procedural storytelling, as well as studies charting declines in news consumption among people under 40 prompted me to think about more dynamic ways of presenting a story.

My colleague Ursula Wolz also urged me to think about less hierarchical, more dynamic story structures. In researching this topic, I became particularly intrigued by the design of A is for Apple. In the summer of 2006, with support from my employer, The College of New Jersey, I was able to enlist two more students, Nia Haqq and Eve Roytshteyn in the creation of more media artifacts, and a design document for the ultimate web-based presentation.

At the end of the summer of 2006, Ursula and I sketched out the plan for the creation of an engine for multi-threaded non-fiction storytelling. At that point, we realized the need for the kind of scriptwriting I am currently trying to invent.

In the fall of 2006, Haqq and Roytshteyn were joined by Scott Hoover and Gemma Waylett, who created more artifacts for the project, including a dynamic interface. I expect to incorporate some version of this design into the final product.