Believe it or not, analyzing seemingly unrelated data can reveal hidden truths. Take the Pentagon, the nerve center of the U.S. military. While classified briefings and high-level meetings happen behind closed doors, open-source data can offer clues about what might be brewing. Here’s where things get interesting. We can use Google Trends data to track searches for “Pentagon pizza delivery” and nearby “gay bars.” Why pizza and bars? Increased late-night activity might indicate longer work hours for Pentagon staff, potentially signifying preparation for a major event.

Story revolves around transformation and change, defined as the “Transformational journey of a human being.“ First type: A character changes drastically for the better, exemplified by “A Christmas Carol“ and “Groundhog Day.“ Second type: A character remains steadfast in their beliefs, changing the people around them instead. Third type: A character fails to change or realizes the need to change too late, resulting in a tragedy. The essence of a story is determined by its support of transformation, guiding what to include or exclude in the narrative.

And the result is a new beta framework: INCITE — Inspiring Narrative Change Innovation through Tracking and Evaluation. This new learning and evaluation framework has been developed to equip the pop culture narrative change field — comprised of artists, values-aligned entertainment leaders and companies, movement leaders, cultural strategists, narrative researchers, philanthropic partners, and more — with a shared methodology to unearth learnings and track short and long-term impact, at both the individual and collective levels. This launch of the beta INCITE framework is the first step in a road testing process set to take place over 2024 to make it useful and usable by field members and funders alike.

Could there be another way to practice copyediting—less attached to precedent, less perseverating, and more eagerly transgressive; a practice that, to distinguish itself from the quietly violent tradition from which it arises, might not be called “copyediting” at all; a practice that would not only “permit” but amplify the potential for linguistic invention and preservation in any written work?

Now though, venturing into the world of AI-assisted transmedia storytelling, we are presented with what could be an exciting opportunity to overcome challenges such as the ones above and perhaps finally see the emergence of “true” transmedia storytelling. Looking at the rapid advancements in AI over the past year and months (and weeks and days!) it quickly becomes clear that these technologies are offering creators a wealth of opportunities to push the boundaries of narrative experiences.

This is SenseMaker in its most simple form, usually structured to have an open (non-hypothesis) question (commonly referred to as a ‘prompting question’) to collect a micro-narrative at the start. This is then followed by a range of triads (triangles), dyads (sliders), stones canvases, free text questions and multiple choice questions. The reason or value for using Sensemaker: Open free text questions are used at the beginning as a way of scanning for diversity of narratives and experiences. This is a way to remain open to ‘unknown unknowns’. The narrative is then followed by signifier questions that allow the respondent to add layers of meaning and codification to the narrative (or experience) in order to allow for mixed methods analysis, to map and explore patterns.

If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? According to digital storyteller, Brian Clark it doesn't! In this DIY conversation, Brian Clark applies the philosophical concept of phenomenology to art in the digital age.

Time/Difference/Relationships vs Head/Heart/Hands (Logical/Metaphor/Literal)

Wondering how big, small, tall, long, fast, heavy, or old something is? The Measure of Things is a tool to help you understand physical quantites in terms of things you (or your audience, or your readers) are already familiar with. Need a metaphor to emphasize a written measurement? Try including a comparison to the size of a whale, or the height of the Empire State Building, or the area of a tennis court. Need to understand how big a metric or English unit really is? Try comparing it to real, tangible objects.

One of the main goals of the project was to develop a model (presented below) that NFPs can use to structure and execute their social media outreach campaigns. The resulting model is an extension of the previous work in this area by the Initiative of Georgetown University Center for Social Impact Communication and the Meyer Foundation. The model rests on five strategic pillars, these are the Campaign Architecture, Narratives, Platforms and Delivery, Third Party Resources and Social Awareness.

One of the exciting promises of web3 is the idea of decentralized networks, so that one decision maker can’t necessarily take down a platform used by hundreds or thousands, alone. But how do you build that network? How does that fit with your business model? Your marketing goals? If you’re a creator, why would you spend the time developing a corner of this new internet just for your project’s fanbase? While social media platforms will persist, there’s a layer that has always separated successful, memorable projects from one-hit wonders: fan communities.

Evidence and Action Towards Safe and Nutritious Food (EatSafe) is looking to positively impact behavior around food safety practices in traditional markets around the world. As part of the program, Story Sourcing uses journalistic techniques to uncover stories and anecdotes from daily life that sheds light on people's motivations, fears, and aspirations. These stories, in turn, help guide the design and development of EatSafe food safety interventions. EatSafe previously conducted this work at traditional markets in Birnin Kebbi, Nigeria.

Now a new study by researchers at The Ohio State University has taken this even further, discovering that people who become immersed in the fiction they read use the same part of the brain to think about fictional characters as they do to think about themselves.

This is the story of a marriage, told through an email being drafted in real time. It takes about five minutes to read/experience.

https://twitter.com/juliayorks/status/1588182939933605888?s=20&t=m8xmsJ8zgWPAAb-FpU2L3w For YEARS, I used the Save the Cat beat sheet template when writing my features. But, I'm currently working with a director who thinks about story using the 8 sequence method, and I liked that too! So, I created a new template that marries both... and then some.

Character.AI is bringing to life the science-fiction dream of open-ended conversations and collaborations with computers. We are building the next generation of dialog agents—with a long-tail of applications spanning entertainment, education, general question-answering and others. Our dialog agents are powered by our own proprietary technology based on large language models, built and trained from the ground up with conversation in mind. How does the Character.AI beta work? The Character.AI beta is based on neural language models. A supercomputer reads huge amounts of text and learns to hallucinate what words might come next in any given situation. Models like these have many uses including auto-complete and machine translation. At Character.AI, you collaborate with the computer to write a dialog - you write one character's lines, and the computer creates the other character's lines, giving you the illusion that you are talking with the other character.

We acquire a lot of information about the world through texts, which can be categorized at the broadest level into two primary genres: narratives and exposition. Stories and essays differ across a variety of dimensions, including structure and content, with numerous theories hypothesizing that stories are easier to understand and recall than essays. However, empirical work in this area has yielded mixed results. To synthesize research in this area, we conducted a meta-analysis of experiments in which memory and/or comprehension of narrative and expository texts was investigated. Based on over 75 unique samples and data from more than 33,000 participants, we found that stories were more easily understood and better recalled than essays. Moreover, this result was robust, not influenced by the inclusion of a single effect-size or single study, and not moderated by various study characteristics. This finding has implications for any domain in which acquiring and retaining information is important.

This toolkit is a short guide to strategic communications, based on extensive research and building on the experience of activists and communicators from around the globe. It aims to provide a framework rather than a blueprint; helping you to ask the right questions rather than giving you the right answers. It’s designed to be helpful for anyone who communicates as part of their voluntary or paid work. It’s written with a focus on European LGBTI activists, but we hope it will be useful to others with a similar vision

All in all, participants got to see the hidden perspectives of a reference group: their fellow students. The stories and assurances didn’t come from professors or administrators, people outside their reference group. By learning these new perspectives, students might look at their adversities on campus a little differently, as a normal part of adjusting to college. Like encouragement we might get from a close friend at a time when we feel adrift, the message in our study sought to make people feel less like a ship lost at sea and more like co-travelers taking the first steps on a journey full of possibility. The stories turned uncertainty about belonging into a basis of connection rather than shame.

plus Field Guide companion doc to this download on same page

t’s because they can be a very powerful narrative tool. Over the last couple of years, I have really come to appreciate the story telling power of that little yellow square. In fact, in my most recent project, I have begun to use them as a way to shorten what are otherwise lengthy passages of text.

If you want to improve your communication skills and utilize storytelling as a valuable tool, you might wonder how to begin or which story to tell. Try this exercise:

One of the main challenges is this: The story most likely to move donors is about a not-yet-solved problem – someone facing a need or challenge and waiting for someone to help them overcome it. But: almost all the time, the story you have is about someone who has already solved their problem. By the time you get in touch and learn their story, they’ve moved on. Things are good. You have a success story, not a need story. That success story is important. It’s exactly what you want in your donor newsletter or donor care letter. It’s not the right story for asking donors to give. A success story inadvertently says, “Everything is a-okay! Your donation is not needed here!” But what are you to do? You have a story. A success story. Would it be better to forget the story and go back to flinging statistics at your donors? Nope. There’s a way to make your success story work in your fundraising. And I’m going to show you how one smart fundraising professional did it.

The sense-making definition of design fiction is to consider the ways that material artifacts — things considered, designed, made, produced in the material sense of things — can structure and arrange our understanding and ability to make sense of sometimes vague, nebulous notions of the future.

In stories told with deficit framing, the people we meet are already in a distressed or perilous state. They are starving, homeless, addicted to drugs, or a victim of abuse. Stories told this way may evoke emotion, but that tends to be pity instead of empathy. The people who are experiencing hardship appear as objects at the mercy of events and without agency to change things. This also strengthens a savior-style narrative that positions the organization as the only thing (along with your dollars, of course) that can fix these broken people. Fortunately, this ethical trap in storytelling can be avoided through a practice called “asset-framing.” Trabian Shorters, a leading expert and advocate for asset-framing, calls it “a narrative model that defines people by their assets and aspirations before noting the challenges and deficits.” This means your story introduces the protagonist (i.e. who the story is about) as a person with accomplishments, hopes and values before we get to the challenges that ultimately led them to your organization.

We argue that other peoples’ failures provide a neglected source of managerial learning that is associated with enhanced learning transfer. Due to their negative valence, stories about other peoples’ failures as compared to stories about other peoples’ successes should elicit a more pronounced motivational response, such that people elaborate the content of failure stories more actively. As a consequence, the knowledge gained from failure stories will more likely be applied on a transfer task. We expect this motivational response to failure stories and its benefits for learning to be most pronounced for people who view failures as valuable learning opportunities. We report an experimental study, in which participants were exposed to a managerial training with stories about either managerial successes or managerial failures that delivered the same learning content. Results showed that stories about managerial failures led to more elaboration and learning transfer, in particular for participants who see the learning potential of failures. We discuss how failure stories can be used to stimulate managerial learning in educational and organizational settings.

Taking your offering to market requires a clear message that resonates with the audience. Your message is meaningful or meaningless: either your message aligns with the dominant cultural narrative and is accepted relatively easy, or your message must alter the cultural narrative before it gains widespread acceptance. Progressive ideas shift the dominant narrative, often at great cost to the messenger. Martin Luther King, like Moses, did not live to enter into the Promised Land. What makes a message convincing? What is a narrative? What makes it dominant? How does a message gain cultural acceptance? How does one shift or disrupt a cultural narrative? We will attempt to answer these questions by drawing on a number of diverse ideas and integrating them into a practical model.

The UN Refugee Agency’s Project Unsung is a speculative storytelling project that brings together creative collaborators from around the world to help reimagine the humanitarian sector and promote narrative change and foresight in our work. The worlds produced through mediums such as non-fiction essays, science fiction, poetry, art and illustration, create visions for how we might radically reimagine our work with communities, our organizations, and our relationships to each other and the planet. The collection is framed across three overarching issues that we believe to be critical for building just futures: Nature (restoring and repairing the world by confronting climate change and ecological loss); Identity (fostering belonging, connection, and kinship); Power (reimaging and reconfiguring power dynamics and social transformation through decolonizing, localizing, and building solidarity across difference). The story of humanitarian innovation needs a new chapter. Join us in imagining better worlds.