{"id":365,"date":"2003-05-31T14:25:29","date_gmt":"2003-05-31T18:25:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/metasj\/spiralnarrative\/"},"modified":"2003-05-31T14:25:29","modified_gmt":"2003-05-31T18:25:29","slug":"spiralnarrative","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/spiralnarrative\/","title":{"rendered":"Coral Reefs, Spiral Narratives, Living Leaves"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Leaves<\/U> which inspired this essay:  the Spire Project<\/A>, a spiral thesis<\/A>, a layered narrative<\/A>, why sifting information<\/A> is hard, <\/P>
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The trunk <\/STRONG>of a tree is alive in a different sense than its leaves; similarly the dead tissue of a coral reef <\/STRONG>is alive and growing in a different sense than its living <\/STRONG>outer extents.<\/P>
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Consider a parallel in narrative<\/STRONG>.  One begins any particular narrative on an important subject to convey a different collection<\/STRONG> of observations, inference, association, private opinion, and tone, than one has found elsewhere.  <\/FONT><\/P>
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Many aspects of this narrative are open to feedback and criticism and change; some are not.  Many elements of narrative structure are arbitrary <\/STRONG>and changeable with audience <\/STRONG>composition and preference; some are not.<\/FONT>  <\/P><\/BLOCKQUOTE>
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A key aspect of narrative is manipulating the audience’s affect, including their interest in and reception of the narrative.  <\/FONT><\/P>
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A<\/FONT> good story in the traditional <\/STRONG>sense leaves the audience with something to cherish and remember and pass on; in the modern <\/STRONG>sense, with a content or excited affect.  Both require maintaining elements of interest throughout.  Neither can affort excess detail or discursion, nor excess brevity and directness.<\/FONT>  <\/P>
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Example<\/U>:  <\/FONT>IntellectualCapital.org<\/FONT><\/A> completely lost my interest from the first page with a central misspelling (and has now lain dormant for years).<\/FONT><\/P><\/BLOCKQUOTE>
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I want to craft stories with a clean <\/STRONG>line through each directed course of thought, with a narrative that (perhaps interleaving a few different lines) spirals around <\/STRONG>these clean lines, touching on them from a number of perspectives in a fluid <\/STRONG>discourse, progressing all the while toward a consistent end.  Details <\/STRONG>needed for consistency, believability, background, extension to other fields of interest, and more, should all spin off <\/STRONG>from this central narrative in their own annoted <\/STRONG>spirals in separate monograph-length chunks, with further recursions <\/STRONG>directed to separate documents (primary sources; page-length lists of facts; documents by others, or with different specific audiences and times; places and people and active <\/STRONG>living sources of information).  More than two such layers within a single document requires better structure <\/STRONG>than mere paper or traditional hypertext.<\/FONT><\/P>
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These leaves <\/STRONG>– surely the facts and background, and perhaps also the individual monographs – merit comments <\/STRONG>and feedback from interested readers, and should have a mechanism for immediate reader annotation.  Central trunks of such a narrative do not; are too complex and carefully built for most readers to add appreciably to them; still allowing, of course, for private notes to the author.<\/P><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Leaves which inspired this essay:  the Spire Project, a spiral thesis, a layered narrative, why sifting information is hard, The trunk of a tree is alive in a different sense than its leaves; similarly the dead tissue of a coral reef is alive and growing in a different sense than its living outer extents. Consider a parallel in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":135,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","template":"","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-365","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/P7iVvB-5T","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/365","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/135"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=365"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/365\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=365"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}