Navigating stories in times of transition: The covid-19 pandemic as a use case
This project aims to develop eScience technologies to advance multidisciplinary approaches around digital storytelling. When societal transitions happen, people respond by telling stories that create continuity and change. In a digital age, storytelling has become even more abundant, rich in variety, and accelerating in pace. The current COVID-19 pandemic allows us to study storytelling while transitions are happening. A multidisciplinary team will analyze how the varieties of stories evolve over time and across different media. eScience challenges include (1) integrating existing Natural Language Processing tools to extract and preprocess stories from existing and growing collections; (2) further developing a Digital Story Grammar methodology to study narrative components in their mutual relations; (3) building a Story Navigator that uses visualization tools, while also allowing for human interpretation; and (4) integrating the tools into the Orange platform to allow re-use by students and researchers. The team will cooperate with national infrastructures, develop online tutorials, and organize a hands-on workshop to facilitate dissemination and long-term use. Interdisciplinary narrative studies will be enriched with necessary tools to analyze storytelling in the digital age as it unfolds in real time across different media and platforms. In this way the research can potentially support sustainable policy making in times of transition.
Funding: NWO/Netherlands escience center
Partners: University of Amsterdam, Danish National Centre for Social Research, National Library of the Netherlands, Institute for Sound & Vision
Supervisors: Gerben Westerhof, Anneke Sools, Julia Noordegraaf, Tobias Blanke
Years: 2017-2021
Post-doc researcher: vacancy