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In All Together Now: Collective Knowledge, Collective Narratives, and Architectures of Participation, Scott Rettberg distinguishes three types of participation a contributor might have in a collective narrative project:

Conscious participation: Contributors are fully conscious of explicit constraints, of the nature of the project, and of how their contribution to it might be utilized.

Contributory participation: Contributors may not be aware of how their contribution fits into the overall architecture of the project, or even of the nature of the project itself, but they do take conscious steps to make their contribution available to the project.

Unwitting participation: Information utilized in the collective narrative are gathered by the machine itself, and contributors have no conscious involvement in the process of gathering the material.

These three levels of participation are not mutually exclusive, in the sense that one collective narrative project could utilize contributions on all three levels.

In this article, Rettberg looks into well stablished systems such as Wikipedia and Flickr to extrapolate methodologies for the creation of collective narratives. Individual Flickr users, for example, aren’t consciously thinking about forging connections with others.

The term Collective Narratives might have different meanings. In my thesis I use the term Narrative firstly to stress the mode of discourse I’m considering: Narrative = describing an experience, event, or series of events as a Story - which is of course different from expository discourse, persuasive discourse, etc.

In general sense, however, Story might be used both as a synonym of narrative, or as a sequence of events described in a narrative. In this sense we may try a narratological approach. Within narratology, narrative can be defined in several ways, but the formal structure is the crucial aspect of all narratological definitions (ref).

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I just joined Facebook and noticed this kind of ’stories’ each member automatically builds. It is a list of statements, organized in groups, which describe the activity of each person in the system. The presentation of this statements in consecutive order sets up an implied causality, which may be interpreted as a narrative.

In Facebook you can also install different applications that allow you to build narratives with friends or other users. One of them, Web Story 2.0, remebers me the stories I’ve build with my collegues with SubEthaEdit, when we were tried to explore the software as a game. (more…)

Storypaths aims to explore the meaning of images in different contexts. The starting point for your story is a Flickr image. By adding some text to this image, your words are interpreted as tags. Images with these tags are going to appear next to inspire your next writing. Just pick one of them and keep going. In this way you just have half control on your story: who knows which pictures were tagged with the words you wrote? or the reasons for a picture to receive this tag? The richness of the game is exactly exceptions created by subjective interpretations.

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Started in Berlin Dropping Knowledge is a good example of what I call ‘collective narratives’. The proposal is quite interesting: by asking questions and getting different answers from people all over the world we are able to understand better how they perceive their environments. Asking questions is in a why finding out about what the other one already knows and in which way he has found out about it. (more…)