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Narrating Complexity

Posted by Steve Smith on Dec 17, 2017; 5:03pm
URL: http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/Narrating-Complexity-tp7590969.html

Narrative Theory and the Cognitive Sciences

Susan Stepney is "a friend of FriAM", currently professor at U. York but formerly research scientist at Logica, UK nominally a competitor to Bios Group back in the day.   She has visited here several times over the past two decades.  Some of you may have met her and her team(s) when they visited.

She and Richard Walsh have a new book coming out on Narrating Complexity

Narrating Complexity

This book stages a dialogue between international researchers from the broad fields of complexity science and narrative studies. It presents an edited collection of chapters on aspects of: how narrative theory from the humanities may be exploited to understand, explain, describe, and communicate aspects of complex systems, such as their emergent properties, feedbacks, and downwards causation; and how ideas from complexity science can inform narrative theory, and help explain, understand, and construct new, more complex models of narrative as a cognitive faculty and as a pervasive cultural form in new and old media.

The book is suitable for academics, practitioners and professionals, and postgraduates in complex systems, narrative theory, literary and film studies, new media and game studies, and science communication.

http://www.springer.com/us/book/9783319647128

Background to this work includes:

http://susan-stepney.blogspot.com/2017/08/book-review-narrative-theory-and.html


David Herman, ed.
Narrative Theory and the Cognitive Sciences.
CSLI. 2003
Some notable excerpts from Susan's review as well as from the book:

Stepney:
The problem is this. We understand the world through narrative (allegedly). Complex systems are unnarratable (so it seems). Therefore, we literally cannot understand complex systems.
Abbot:
We understand the world through explanatory narratives of entities with agency. Parts of the world that do not have suitable structure are unnarratable, and hence are not easily understood. Evolution is one such process.
Herman
Narrative can have many cognitive functions. It is a system for structuring patterns of events progressing through time: for structuring processes. It can be used to “chunk” experiences into “frames” of stereotypical experiences, then used to compare this typical against the actual. This helps us to understand the world more, and therefore have to memorise less. It allows us to generate and evaluate what-if scenarios. It allows us to draw coherent system boundaries: to extract and bound a relevant collection of participants, events, and structures from the overall stream of events we experience.


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