Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film

Abstract: This paper describes a corpus annotation project to study issues in the manual annotation of opinions, emotions, sentiments, speculations, evaluations and other private states in language. The resulting corpus annotation scheme is described, as well as examples of its use. In addition, the manual annotation process and the results of an inter-annotator agreement study on a 10,000-sentence corpus of articles drawn from the world press are presented.

Abstract: A fundamental problem in text data mining is to extract meaningful structure from document streams that arrive continuously over time. E-mail and news articles are two natural examples of such streams, each characterized by topics that appear, grow in intensity for a period of time, and then fade away. The published literature in a particular research field can be seen to exhibit similar phenomena over a much longer time scale. Underlying much of the text mining work in this area is the following intuitive premise—that the appearance of a topic in a document stream is signaled by a “burst of activity,” with certain features rising sharply in frequency as the topic emerges. The goal of the present work is to develop a formal approach for modeling such “bursts,” in such a way that they can be robustly and efficiently identified, and can provide an organizational framework for analyzing the underlying content. The approach is based on modeling the stream using an infinite-state automaton, in which bursts appear naturally as state transitionss it can be viewed as drawing an analogy with models from queueing theory for bursty network traffic. The resulting algorithms are highly efficient, and yield a nested representation of the set of bursts that imposes a hierarchical structure on the overall stream. Experiments with e-mail and research paper archives suggest that the resulting structures have a natural meaning in terms of the content that gave rise to them.

Abstract: What is narrative? How does it work and how does it shape our lives? H. Porter Abbott emphasizes that narrative is found not just in literature, film, and theatre, but everywhere in the ordinary course of people's lives. This widely used introduction, now revised and expanded in its third edition, is informed throughout by recent developments in the field and includes one new chapter. The glossary and bibliography have been expanded, and new sections explore unnatural narrative, retrograde narrative, reader-resistant narratives, intermedial narrative, narrativity, and multiple interpretation. With its lucid exposition of concepts, and suggestions for further reading, this book is not only an excellent introduction for courses focused on narrative but also an invaluable resource for students and scholars across a wide range of fields, including literature and drama, film and media, society and politics, journalism, autobiography, history, and still others throughout the arts, humanities, and social sciences.

Abstract: Using narrative theory, this article explores strategic management as a form of fiction. After introducing several key narrative concepts, we discuss the challenges strategists have faced in making strategic discourse both credible and novel and consider how strategic narratives may change within the "virtual" organization of the future. We also provide a number of narrativist-oriented research questions and methodological suggestions.