A community’s stories are an important source of information about the community because they:

    • indicate issues that the contributors deem to be important
    • identify specific events and entities connected with issues
    • convey emotional context of an issue
    • convey qualities and attributes about entities
    • can indicate how well issues resonate with others in the community
 
What is a Story? A “story” or “narrative” for StoryGarden is simply a recounting of an event or an idea for a reader or listener. For StoryGarden’s use, stories do not need a professional writer’s capabilities in providing story structure or a great vocabulary. Rather, a simple recounting of what is important to a writer is all that is required. Credibility, simplicity and clarity are of paramount importance. Having said that, StoryGarden can work with short narratives contributed specifically, or it can search the web to look for and analyse all the blog posts, media articles, scholarly studies that can be discovered on a particular topic.

StoryGarden analyses a collection of stories (a “corpus”) to discover values, attitudes and opinions found in a collection of narratives. Used effectively, StoryGarden can:

  • elicit input from diverse and hard-to-reach constituencies.
  • quantify the importance of emerging trends and issues
  • display results in a way that highlights, quantifies mainstream and outlier subgroups and map trends and emerging issues over time
  • allow analysts to explore the subgroups to more deeply understand the issues and priorities of those subgroups.
  • provide fine-grained permissions for access to particular story collections and analysis ranging from public access to a very focused access to particular groups