The workshop was a multi-disciplinary approach to language, interaction, narrative, cognition, and culture. The idea was to bring together people who do not normally meet in a fruitful learning experience. Participants were ten presenters, about 25 PhD students, some post-docs and some Master students. Geographically, all continents were represented.
The workshop contained the following lectures/presentations:
Narrative turned out to be the central theme of the workshop. Other discussed themes were language and interaction. To some extent, culture was discussed. Very little attention was given to cognition. The approaches presented by the lecturers fall into two groups: studying narrative itself, or using narrative as a tool to study something else. The lectures by Ochs, Anward, M H Goodwin, Brandt, C Goodwin, and Nair fall into the first group while the lectures by Bamberg, Chandler, and Lightfoot fall into the second (even though Brandt's lecture was only moderately concerned with narrative).
What is narrative?
No explicit discussion was made concerning the nature of narrative. However, the various approaches presented all gave their own, partial answers to the question. Ochs made a case for the openness and uncertainty of personal narratives. These narratives rarely follow structural properties discussed in the literature. The narratives discussed by Anward was oral and written (fairytales), and was given a structural analysis. C Goodwin demonstrated how narrative (although he prefer the term "stories") should be considered a multi-modal, interactive field, constructed by several participants with speech, gesture, body, and environment. His view was that a narrative cannot be captured as text on a page. Definitions of narrative have built-in assumptions on how one wants to work with them, according to C Goodwin. Nair concluded that narrative is a cultural way to explain the world. All lecturers appeared to subscribe to the notion that narrative as an object could exist independently, externally from individual minds. Nair said that "narrative is a linguistic structure". Ochs gave methodological reasons for considering narrative an external object. Even if narrative can be internal, these would be "hard to get at", she said. Slobin appeared agnostic on the issue, but practically treated transcriptions of oral storytelling as "narrative". Brandt had a semiotic notion of narrative, that is, a view that narrative exists as an external object with a particular structure.
Points and comments on the lectures
Abstracts are available here.
There was a special interest group titled Computer-based Tools For the Analysis of Narrative Data. Participants contributed to a list of software for the analysis of language and interaction data. Two software packages were demonstrated:
The workshop contained two group work sessions:
Here I present some collected personal notes and comments related to my own PhD research.
I asked the lecturers (Bamberg, Nair, Slobin, Mr Goodwin, and Mrs Goodwin) whether they agreed upon the perspective of cognition as an explanation on a different level than, e.g., social explanations. None of them adhered to this perspective. Slobin viewed cognition and culture not as a question of levels, but rather as different spheres on the same level. Mr Goodwin stated that cognition is inherently distributed.
Concerning the question whether narrative could exist without language, a book was mentioned: Susan Schaller: A Man Without Words. Also, William James wrote some articles concerning this in the late 1800s.
Questions to Slobin: "You talked about the importance of embodiment for computational modelling of narrative comprehension, but how is this different from incorporating world-knowledge as have been done with, e.g., Schank's programs from the 70s and the CYC project?". He answered that in these new approaches, a body is actually simulated. Also, the work is done with artificial neural networks (se ICSI group at Berkeley). Both of these are different from a traditional symbol manipulating approach based on propositional logic. "What is your conception of 'narrative'? Are mental representations of a narrative mere more or less distorted versions of it?". He answered that he doesn't know, and that the way to solve this was to just stipulate some notion of narrative.
Question to C Goodwin: "You have successfully demonstrated that narrative is constructed in a multi-modal, interactive field. Now, what implications does this have for comprehension of written narrative?" He answered that he hadn't thought about it, although it was interesting, but that written narrative might well incorporate these mechanisms in some way.
Question to Ochs: "You say that narrative - as something extracted from a recording of a conversion - often is unclear and have several meanings. But couldn't this be resolved by attributing the meaning to the individual narrative comprehender, a person?" She didn't agree, but agreed that narrative can be internal, but mostly after having been externalised and then re-internalised (I am unsure exactly what she takes this to be). She even maintained that the uncertainty is present in the events themselves. In stating this, I think she confuses the levels of description: the events and the description of these events. To my mind, the description may very well be uncertain, but there are no doubts whether the events themselves happened, and in what order.
Bamberg appears to contrast narrative with epic. This seems odd, as I think epic should be considered as a type of narrative.
Brandt claimed that play and fiction doesn't mix, which is in direct contrast with my own thoughts.