How empowering for this community to be able to speak their hopes and dreams and then work towards realising them. My role involves working in therapeutic ways to support change within families. Although we hope to see change take place within communities it may take decades before significant change can be seen. I was really struck by the enormous potential when whole communities are involved in working towards change. The collective sharing of knowledge and skills has enormous strength.
This was reiterated for me by the wonderful use of a bundle of sticks to show that each stick is so much stronger when brought together into a bundle. The Tree of Life and the Mt Elgon Community Project resonated for me in the way they brought together the past, present and future. The narrative metaphor, as I understand it at this point, is the notion that people digest their reality and understand themselves and others through story.
It is also the understanding that, for a reason that is not yet completely clear to me, we tend to cling to a single story. Maybe the single story is a powerful well-structured one that is clear to us? Maybe it was born out of urgent necessity for sense and provided comfort through its internal logic, a calming simplicity which one is naturally reluctant to let go of?
Maybe it was reinforced by people who were meaningful to us? It is also a tool that gives us the opportunity to take a step back and recall that we are not only the main characters of our stories, but also their storytellers, writers and editors. The dominant stories I tell me about myself are often quite rigid and severe. Inviting the narrative approach into my thinking gives me the possibilities of agility and playfulness.
It invites curiosity and creativity into my personal storytelling, and reminds me that memory, reality and truth are not set in stone. The narrative metaphor gives me the possibility to continuously challenge, create and get to know myself by experimenting with the ways in which I interpret my life. Letter back from Malcolm Turnbull saying no. Also had meetings with the AFL and I believe we can win them over to sing the new lyrics at Dreamtime.
Having commenced a Masters of Counselling which is based in post-modern epistemology and therapeutic approaches which are embedded in the this epistemology. Clients as the expert in their own lives — Just as they have the glue to become stuck, they also possess the solvent to become unstuck. I enjoy the process of listening to client language and stories and deconstructing dominate narrative — thickening stories.
Loved the Sugar illustration. This could equally be used to work with depression or anxiety. Found it judgemental and empathic and externalising allowed the separation of the person and the problem. She offered a way to talk about the problem of diabetes that allowed her audience to see it as that—a problem that exists but also that there are other ways to think and talk about the problem. The clip with Mark Hayward was helpful for me in understanding how this happens.
I no doubt will learn about that! Robert — Gold Coast, Qld, Australia. So freeing to come to the realisation that we are not what we have been told we are — by our family, society, key people in our lives.. And how we can choose different realities to build our sense of who we are.. How much kinder can we be to ourselves and to others when we stand in this space? I really heard it this time and it was certainly important for this chapter. There was so much to process in such a small number of words. Particularly as I am doing this alone at the moment and the chance for proper discussion will not come soon.
I feel a bit psychologically paralysed by all of the ideas to consider in relation to privilage. Having others to discuss it with seems vital in order to be able to pull it apart into digestible amounts. It pervades many areas of my life I am sure and will require much concentration in many situations to explore and find different ways to mitigate it. Enclousure, struggling, get bogged, presure, an so on. Thats why this therapy works to desolve this matters, and pushes away all, to increase stories and open endings.
The Sugar story was amazing. What an insightful way to set up a safe environment for people to ask questions and gain an understanding of diabetes. I also loved the Balck Dog video. This was a great visual aid to support an understaning of externalising a problem. It is quite amazing how through the sharing of ideas with his partner David Epson everything came together to build this way of seeing people and their problems. In other words, watching people as something separeted from the problem. A way of including them into the conversation and a way of acknowledging their experience.
I look forward to get to know more of the practices included into the narratives approaches as I read through the chapters. Care, to create an ongoing conversation with the participants struggling with those health conditions. It made me think on how can I apply this way of dealing with serious problems in my context and community, leading me to the conclusion and desire of working with drug related problems.
In my community, located in Mexico, the drug related problems inbetween young people are constantly prevailing, many times because of a lack of work and educational opportunities, so, in this regard, translaping the Little by little we make a bundle ideas into the context of problematic drug use and abuse is appealing to me: I think that in creating a conversation and a safe place for young people to express their concerns, likes and dis-likes about drug use, and peripheral things that sustain the usage may be a very good idea to try to analyze new possibilities in to how to relate one self to life….
I found this chapter very interesting! This, because of the usage of the therapeutic documents, in counselling context. At the same time I was reading this chapter, I was reading other book too about this same topic, and in it I found very interesting statements about the using of documents in therapy, and how this idea was brought to the narrative practices. For instance, when a couple get married, a document is considered very importan to legitimize the union. Coming back to our talk, it is very intelligent how authors of narrative practices noticed that, and included that way of legitimize into the counselling context.
On the other hand, the way of working with audiences is wonderfull! I liked a lot the quote saying: Within witness audiences people may be seen in their own terms! I found further more interesting the analysis laying under this witness practice. Not replicate the relations of power people may come with, instead looking always out for the unexpected outcomes in order to thicken stories. Not applaud, one of the most important, I think. Well, my coments about this Map on externalizing conversations are: At the same time I Could say that the efects of externalizing are great!
The concept of the narrative particularly resonates with me. They come with stories of trauma and fractured relationships but what I see is strength and resilience. Seeking alternative and thickened stories will help to illustrate their inherent strengths and resilience. It takes the focus of the individual to see the problem as a live entity.
Having OCD as a separate entity from themselves may invite them to recognise the problem is not them. The mapping of conversation was also insightful to enable me to expand conversation. Also to be mindful of the questions I am asking clients that they may not be ready for, it allows me the opportunity to create the space where clients can reflect and gain their own insight.
It was very much a relief to know that within narrative practice, perpetrators of violence in whatever form are given the space to take responsibility for their actions and its impact. What made it for me in this chapter is the notion of poststructural way of thinking. It is very important to be at the look out for ways of speaking that better describe peoples experience at the therapy room, and I think that the externalized way of talking has come to fulfill this neccesity.
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This notion, is in many ways liberating, specially in those cases where a heavy tag has been putted. Alchoolisim, Drug addiction, Poverty, and so on. Also, looking for the intentions that might be hiden on a discourse, and seeing the ways in which I may be able to separete me from the undesireble effects. It is certainly hard and difficult to have this kind of conversations as a natural way.
It is true that most of the people in this post-modern world is looking to have a good and confortable live, specially when the social system is constructed with that pourpose. So, it is hard, specially for profesionals like me psychologist and many others not to enjoy ourselves in the privileges the schoolar and social system its been putting into our heads since they exist. It is very joyfull thinking in this matters of privilege and power, as a individuals, and always trying to make the best for our friends or family members and people in general in order to make them feel good with themselves and creating an enviroment where respect is always present.
Hi from Dublin,Ireland again. I enjoyed thinking about collaborating as I was reading this chapter and was particularly struck by Sue Manns reflections and practice change in relation to writing in peoples notes. I used to write in a set of shared notes and I understand how alienating it must feel to people to have a set of notes about them that they cant look at whenever they like or contribute to in a meaningful way. This was very refreshing for me and something I would consider trying in the future. It was also interesting that not everyone showed an desire to write collaboratively in the notes.
It was interesting to see how to June realised what she valued and how this in turn led to discovering new ways of managing SP. Using Externalising with clients has enabled them to create a separation between them and the problem. Within that space they have been able to connect the dots they had previously not been aware of. Allowing them to recall other layers of their story. This process has enabled me to listen and ask questions in a different way, to be a witness and support to clients on their journey to recovering themselves. It has also given me the vocabulary to widen the conversations within the therapeutic space.
I recognise that I am very early in my learning journey but already finding much that resonates such as the continual reinforcement of the dominant narrative metaphor or story in our lives and how it can be changed by applying different lens or perspectives. Also,the comment about externalising the problem and the solution is sometimes not the personal.
Hi there, My name is Celine and I come from Sydney. I have come to the Dulwich Center to learn more about and familiarise myself with the healing conversations of narrative therapy. I am a trained counsellor and psychotherapist and I am currently doing an undergrad in Psychology. I find Narrative practice a very powerful method of retelling and reinterpreting our life experiences. For me part of the power of narrative therapy is the ability to change our overused and often unhelpful story lines when reliving past experiences.
Why are these narratives still running and what purpose do they serve us or our clients? Thinking of stories in this way makes me realise that there are other narratives, gaps in storytelling, strengths and positivity within the self talk of clients struggling with particular issues and that the current narrative is not the only story that makes up this experience. There are in fact several narratives from which we can grow and learn — returning power to the client. Hello, I am a Clinical Psychology registrar who works across a diverse population.
Narrative practices fit well with my way of looking at the world. Life is not a single linear path. A metaphor I often use is that our lives are like a giant jigsaw puzzle. The pieces ultimately fit together but as we build the puzzle, pieces seem to overlap or be missing, or sometimes turn out to be in the wrong spot or the wrong way round.
As a qualitative researcher I believe individuals to be the expert in their life, that the perspective of an issue or situation is the truth for that person at that time, and that it is possible to have contradictory views at any one time. I am writing from Vancouver, BC. I have really enjoyed reading about collective narrative practices, and I think my initial reaction to it says a lot about how rare this kind of work is in therapeutic work. I think the idea of communities banding together and sharing their resources of healing with one another to be beautiful, and I kept being struck by how little work it would be for the therapist to allow these groups to share with one another.
I can speak from personal experience about the power of collective narrative practice as well, although I did not realize until now that I have been a part of one of these practices. At the time I imagined this experience to be about helping the field, but I remember even without going with the intention of therapeutic growth how beneficial it was for me. It was a place where my experiences involving pain and confusion had value for others, and that knowledge provided a very profound feeling of validation and respect in my experiences.
This knowledge gives me a sense of hope in using collaborative narrative practice in the future. I am writing from Vancouver, BC in Canada. Reading about narrative practice has been fascinating as a whole because I find it encapsulates what many of us instinctually do in daily life to cope anyways, but contains it in documents that can be used and looked at repeatedly.
I think the idea of carrying a document of authority around like Anita did could be very helpful. I thought writing it down and having it onhand at any instance would be a great way to stay on track and remember our intentions for a shift in identity or lifestyle. I love the idea behind documents of circulation as well, because I think so many therapeutic modalities are so individually focussed that the impact of community is left up to chance.
I am curious to learn of some of the methods used in helping individuals to cope with that. I am in Dublin, Ireland and I enjoyed reading about the Tree of Life projects and was interested that it could be used so effectively with adults and children. The importance of the forest appealed to me as a way of highlighting the value of our community and family and friends.
One of the biggest difficulties people often face is a feeling of isolation and feeling they are not alone can be very healing. Using the roots to help explain why the person is where there are allows their story to be heard but it becomes clear that this is only one piece and there is a lot of room for alternative stories. I was also interested to hear how songs were being used to strengthen people and their stories. Hello, my name is Athina. I come from Greece, Ioannina. I am teaching at the university.
I really enjoyed narrative metaphor chapter of this online course, so thank you for this! I think of narrative metaphor as a whole paradigm of thinking, feeling and acting. Stories can be a significant resource through which we can make contact with the language of our inner lives and the context within which they are shaped. Storytelling encompasses past, present and future. It reinforces critical thinking, dealing with feelings, exploring and revealing alternative stories, discovering our strengths, taking action and reclaiming our rights and our lives.
Hello, I am Kirsten, writing from Melbourne Australia. It is fun — it connects us with our long history as storytellers. I think it would make a difference to rename and characterise these problems, because many people hold a view that their problems are part of them. Because of this, change seems like an impossible task.
I will be sending this through all social media and work distribution lists. I would love to put this on my phone so I can play it to other Australians throughout my journey. I would vote for this as our National Anthem in a heartbeat!! Externalization create space between people and the problems they have in their lives, which creates a huge amount o relief. I have seen clients blaming themselves for the issues and got trapped in the trouble without being able to jump out of it and view it from a different standpoint.
Also personify the issue really inspires, I think it will be particularly helpful when working with young clients. I also really appreciate the attitude shared in the end that we are exploring the experiences with our client together. When I think about what I have learned about narrative therapy in this course, two aspects come to my mind: This is a principle that I feel very much commited to. I am developing this attitude or way of life through my nonviolent communication and mindfulness practice.
I can see various effects of this practice in my professional and personal interactions with others, especially as it helps me to listen with empathy and care. The second aspect is the therapeutical skill in which I see myself as a co-researcher who supports the author in developing thick descriptions about themselves while leaving the authroship with the author. Here, I really like the method of externalising and, in my context, of outsider witnesses. Therefore, some of the tools e. But, in the work with communities which have experienced traumatic events, I can see how bringing witnesses to the stories can bring about change.
This is something I would like to experiment with. I am also grateful for the many comments I was able to read which helped me understand some of the ideas better and see the diverity in which the content could be understood, relfected, summarised, paraphrased and translated. As others already commented, critical thinking means to become a child again that looks at the world with curiosity and blank pages to fill. What really caught my attention was a word by Mary Heath on safety. How can we protect ourselves less and collaborate more? I also really enjoyed the writings on privilege.
I have experienced some of the restraints personally and it used to make me angry to hear them as I am longing for more people to understand how much power and privilege contributes to the violence and inequality we see in this world. Reading this collection of things people say in their defense reminds me that it is challenging to talk about power and privilege especially since it is a phenomenon that cannot be approached from an individual perspective although it is certainly individuals who benefit or suffer from it.
This helped me to be a little bit compassionate with people who I experience as defensive in relation to the discussions on power and privilege. So I am very much looking forward to that practice! I have a guide to use now when dealing with indigenous inmates who have lost a love one. What stood out for me was getting the person to tell me their thoughts on how they may have contributed to the life of whom they speak about.
I think this would benefit the person, as they are in prison isolated from family and can have feelings of shame, not being able to attend the service. Sharing stories from other communities like the Aboriginal people from Port Augusta and their stories, stories of resistance and survival.
Reading Aunty Barbs message of support in the Dignity and Pride, Strengthening Resistance pg36 , to be able to sit and listen to my elders share their stories, their art and dances empowers our mob. Joining with others in dance, song and laughter — when you have lived through genocide, revelling and enjoying life has new meaning.
As with my culture our people have endured feelings of despair and hopelessness.
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I felt pride and privilege as she talked of our ways of resilience and resistance. As an Aboriginal woman, I have listened to the stories and I still watch in our modern times the continuance of systemic oppression. How we have survived genocide and overcome generational traumas through love of our culture and peoples. I had heard of the Shame Mat and the purpose behind it. Which led me to using it in when I facilitated my Positive Futures Program for indigenous men.
When first using the mat the participants were a bit hesitant, but after using it a couple of times the men were comfortable using it before each session. The outcomes I have seen since using the mat have been positive. The men have been more open in talking about the reasons why they commit domestic violence on their partners. There has been more disclosers and exploration into behaviours, feelings and consequences of their actions. Since using the mat I have found that they are more engaging, and want to participate in the program.
Also very accepting of being challenged around there offending behaviours, I believe the use of shame mat has enabled this to happen. On many occasions over the years I have questioned myself, why do I keep fighting for positive outcomes for my people. Through the reading it made me think and become aware that I am not alone in this fight and there are many more indigenous passionate people out there doing the best they can and fighting on not matter how many times they have been disappointed , they get up and continue on with the fight. Kerry has shown this through her ability to overcome adversity and strength to become one of the respected leaders of her community.
By telling her story through using poetry as a form of therapy she has found a way to move forward even in her darkest hours. I will take from the reading that we all have struggles through life but we have to find the strength to overcome these hurdles. This reading has given more than ideas I can utilise in work practice. It has given me a new outlook into my life and the reason why I am passionate about the field of work I have chosen to do not only for myself but mainly for outcomes for my people.
I resonate a lot with all the efforts described to work more collaboratively with communities or individual clients. It is good reading about the success stories as they open up the space of what is possible. I am wondering though what challenges people face during these efforts? In my own experience with working collaboratively I have seen quite some resistance and been lectured many times. So, I would enjoy also hearing some of these stories and how people deal with resistance.
In the recent years I have become more and more aware of the issues of power and privilege and how I may perpetuate violence through my actions, words and thoughts. The past chapters on narrative practice have reinforced my desire to estbalish a decentered influential posture that allows for the author to discover knowledge and skills and leaves the authorship with the author.
I feel a little impatient and nervous with regards to the posture and the informed not knowing as it requires intense and continued spiritual practice and still there are many situations to come in which I will not manage to adhere to these principles that are so important to me. So, I am hoping to find and build community that will help me along this path. Critical thinking is a topic that is frequently on my mind, particularly when hiring, coaching and training new staff members.
I find that often individuals struggle with thinking outside the box and when they are able to do so they are challenged with presenting their differing ideas in a way that is respectful. This is something that I am thinking about as we look closely at how my agency recruits, hires and coaches our new team members. I see these challenges with individuals who have recently graduated from degree programs. Thinking critically however; perhaps there is a problem with how I am eliciting feedback from these individuals, given my power in my role. Therefore, I really like the idea of being a co-researcher rather than establishing the duality of therapist and patient.
Many thanks for this video. I look forward to sharing information gained from this video with the Case Workers during our up-coming supervision sessions. Strength be with you as you continue your work Eileen. It was interesting to see how he worked with Joey to establish his position about the bullying as it was not easy for Joey to find the words.
A lot of time was spent on establishing a common understanding of what the bullying looked like. It felt important for Joey to have his say about this. I found his discussion about balancing the persons responsibility and not defining the person by the problem thought provoking. At work, I have found being able to separate the person from the problem to be very helpful in particular with children who often feel powerless in situations. In a previous role where the main part of my job was to develop assessments for families experiencing homelessness and create and coordinate services, I would collaborate with the families in authoring their own story.
I would use a variety of tools to spark conversation and elicit information from the families about their perspectives of their lives; historical, current, hopes and dreams, what services they thought might fit for them etc. Occasionally co-authoring stories through assessments and service plans could be challenging, particularly when families had a very different truth of their experiences than anyone else involved often when there was significant and pervasive mental health diagnoses. Continuing to expand tools being used may make collaborations such as this work better.
Finding creative frameworks and tools to assess from that vary from the typical western frameworks being used could better support this process. The first step is the hardest, or something similar. I will definitely be using the analogy of silent crying as a way to talk about pain and grief in my work moving forward.
The imagery is impactful and may lessen perceived vulnerability of the emotions that lead to silent crying, by some. Saying Hullo Again White , p. I am often yarning to clients who have lost a family member and the hullo again metaphor strikes a chord with me as I am sure it would with my clients as each of them are finding ways to deal with the loss of a loved one in their life. I thought about the hullo metaphor and began asking her re-membering questions.
I first began to have a discussion with her about externalising the depression explaining that the depression she was feeling was outside of who she is, separate from her, she looked confused so I continued with the re-membering questions with her. She described the frustration she felt with family members who were interfering in her relationship and how her x-partner had let her down. Sometimes in Aboriginal culture, when you marry or have children with an Aboriginal man or woman you often take on the whole family, Aboriginal people often have this joke with one another, in our family we do.
We are very family orientated and sometimes this can feel like a hindrance for people who are not aware of the bond we share with our Aboriginal families. I again felt my landscape of enquiry began to dwindle but when I reflect back on my conversation with this client I could see the potential for a sparkling moment and re-authoring of the the thin description my client had of the failure. I thought about questions I could implement with clients who often speak about their ancestors with sadness and mourn at the loss of them and other family members.
I reflected on questions such as those described in the Remembrance: Some questions I reflected on were;. The following is more of a thought rather than a question or a dilemma. Aunty Barbara Wingard talks about how Aboriginal people sit in silence because of the loss of a loved one is to painful to speak about. I find the Aboriginal people in my community have forgotten how to honour their loved ones who have passed.
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Re-membering conversations give our people, our families permission to talk about their loved ones who have passed in respectful and honouring ways, thereby keeping the spirit of the loved one who has passed away alive because their spirit is our spirit. Some Aboriginal people in my community have forgotten how to grieve a lost loved one, re-membering conversations help us to honour them and to sit collectively and celebrate them as their spirit lives on in us and through us, their spirit is in the land, the trees, the rivers, oceans and the animals that often visit us from time to time to let us know that they are near.
I was deeply moved reading how people face their loved ones, who are going through hardship, with so much love and care. And I am mourning that so many young people all around the world are facing hardship due to the effects of patriarchy, colonialism and other social, political, economic or cultural inequalities. I was pleased reading about so many different innovative projects and I am still listening to the Friday Talks. As I am also working with communities, I have a better picture now how collective narrative practice can be used in commmunity work.
In my context, songs and rituals have a great importance in social life. Although I get the impression that they often focus on the hardship rather than the skills and knowledges, this chapter helps me acknowledge the opportunities of using songs and rituals for documenting knowledge and skills and creating thick stories. While reading the examples of documents, I was wondering whether any skill that someone mentions how they deal with a problem is useful to document. I understood from this chapter that the skills are not judged by the therapist or narrative practitioner.
Does that mean that I might support skills even though I might think that they are not effective skills to handle a problem? I really enjoyed reading the paper on outsider-witnesses. The questions that can guide the outsider-witness are very helpful to keep track of what is relevant to listen for. I particularly like that this practice enables a more collaborative approach as the witness might learn as much as the storyteller.
I can imagine that this feels very empowering to the storyteller. I will definitely try to integrate reflecting teams or outsider-witnesses more into my work. Sometimes people name skills that are helpful in some circumstances but not others, sometimes they name skills that are have both positive and negative effects … so care does need to be taken in relation to fully exploring the effects of various skills. We also sometimes hear a number of different skills people are using and deliberately pay more attention to some rather than others.
I hope this makes sense. And I hope all is okay there in Colombo. I am writing from Lake Kivu in Rwanda! The black dog video was really helpful in the way it was gentle in explanation. The narrator described a range of situations and progressions of depression, while consistently externalising it as something that was with him, rather than of him. As a practitioner in a high school, a range of issues can be externalised such as problematic behaviours, negative self-perception in relation to achievement, and of course mental health issues.
Story telling has always been a powerful vehicle for teaching and learning. When I was introduced to the idea of seeing how my own personal story was connected to the archetypal stories of old, some how it redeemed my personal suffering. Each time I look back over my own life I see that I adjust and rewrite it according to what lens I am looking through.
For me Narrative Therapy is developing this idea. Kia ora koutou katoa, hello to all. My name is Kirsten. I grew up in Rotorua, New Zealand. Now I love in Melbourne, Australia. I am a writer and occupational therapist. After exploring these materials I feel really excited to journey onward! When it comes to dominant stories, it seems like we are often such convincing storytellers and such willing listeners!
I am feeling some compassion for my elders who imparted damaging and limited storylines to me in early life. I would love to be part of assisting people to see what else might be available. My personal goals as a counsellor and a teacher align with these ideas in that I believe that clients are the experts of their own experience. This comes from my own experience as a person with a disability — it is irritating when I am told what my experience is instead of being listened to. I am excited about learning more! My name is Glen. I live in Newcastle, Australia. On one hand, critical thinking and questioning is creative and enjoyable.
Central points for me include: This chapter has done a good job showing that knowledge, power and privilege go together. An aspect of a de-centred stance for me is a commitment to people being the expert on their lives and it is only the person seeking assistance the young person K who can describe what living with this problem is like and to say what his position or positions is are in relation to it. I respect K as having authorship.
This is a question I will think about further. Somehow we stumbled into his relating a story to me. A friend had told him when he went through the turnstile at the racecourse that he was given a pumpkin in place of his real head. We laughed — at last! I had no idea at the time that it was an externalising conversation.
Back then I did not know anything about narrative ideas and practices. A recent example comes readily into my thoughts. I encountered the effects of Frustration and how it extended its invitation to me. When the Frustration gets me in its grip, I can feel the influences of Hope and Imagination draining away. The central features of the problem emerged anew and its influences, which seemed to become apparent more clearly than before. I inquired with K regarding what living with the problems the Anger and the Guilt is like for him.
I have asked K to consider this question between the end of our last meeting and our next meeting. I found it a more refreshing and creative experience. Mostly it would be positive because I perceive that people appreciate the efforts I am making. Perhaps sometimes it could be negative. I perceive that they would experience me as both compassionate and optimistic.
My attention was caught especially by the Black dog video and the Sugar story. It visualised in a very clear and persuading manner what it means to externalise a problem. I also liked the idea of finding an experience-near description of the problem as I can see how it leaves ownership with and acknowledges the specific experience of the person. However, I am wondering how people with traumatic experiences are able to work with the questions and self-reflect in such a way about their experiences or themselves. What other more playful and less cognitive methods could be helpful to externalise problems?
In my context, the problems of social, political and economic exclusion and discrimination could be externalised. I am worried though that seeing the context might not ease the hardship as the context is unlikely to change. So I am curious about the next step. And I am also wondering if I would use same techniques if I work with groups rather than individuals. I did love this chapter in plenty of parts. It keept my attention that very few are currently considering positions where external factors are golden-key to band things and descriptions that happen around people, families, and other social settings.
It resonated heavily with me, because of the frustration it may cause for families in consentrating themeselves in conversations -in the therapy room- where everything pin-point the to them as responsible for they misfortunes. The idea of narrative metaphor resonates a lot with me and connects to similar ideas that I appreciate in other fields like restorative justice or nonviolent communication.
In particular, the idea that we shape our own identity by the stories we tell about ourselves. What I believe about myself is based on which story I pick to describe myself. In my understanding, the narrative metaphor acknowledges the diversity of experiences we make thus the diversity of different, colourful, ambiguous, soothing, distracting to name just a few stories we can tell about ourselves. I understand it as an invitation to see me and others beautiful with all the aspects that are part of life. And here comes the second part that I appreciate which takes the interdependence of humans and the wider context into account.
I do not exist in a vacuum. How I pick the stories that I choose to be my single story is also determined by family, culture, society, history, politics etc. As a member of a family, community, or society I thus also share responsibility in having set the conditions for a person to tell a story about themselves that might not be contributing to life. And I also would like to share my gratitude for all the comments here which have inspired me.
I enjoyed reading so many different descriptions! I would like to send my deepest thanks to all of the Men and Elders who contributed and shared their knowledge in these insightful films. As a woman who is privileged to work with families in the local community it has greatly increased my understanding of the experiences of men whose voices and worldviews are often overlooked in working with families due to a range of social and cultural reasons.
Through sharing your stories you have enabled me to be more mindful of the important role you play in the lives of not only your families but building stronger communities. Kelly Human Services Worker. Michael White, so characteristically, explains the importance of solidarity with people who are seeking assistance.
Solidarity is such an important principle to live by. Co-research and ethnographic imagination stood out because they provide a perspective that is both practical and a fresh perspective. I perceive that these concepts, when brought to life as David does so well , emphasise how unique each person and family are. Solidarity stands out as a deeply humanising component of the work with people who come to see me. My training is in psychology and while there was training in counselling skills and person centred therapy, it did not bring to the fore a concept like solidarity.
This is one that I will treasure. I have used the practice of collaborative note taking previously, though not with Narrative practice specifically in mind at that time. I was influenced by solution focused ideas, with the central emphasis on cooperation. I would pause 10 minutes or so before the scheduled end time for the meeting. I asked people what were the points that came to mind which they wanted to me to write down in a summary. I conveyed points that I recalled too, asking if these were something that they would like added.
I photocopied the notes, giving one copy to the person seeking assistance and keeping one for the record. Looking back, what made it possible was having the initiative to engage people in a cooperative way. The feedback from people was positive and it encouraged me to keep doing it for a while.
What might make it hard to enter into these practices? This had an intimidating effect on me. I did not question what I had been told. It might not even be accurate from a complaints process or legal standpoint. With hindsight I am able to think more independently when professional colleagues sharing opinions of this sort. For me feeling judged would make it hard to enter into collaborative practices. I have just started planning some workshops with a headteacher for parents to have opportunities to meet together with me if they want.
I am writing from Dublin, Ireland and am enjoying reminding myself how pervasive and persuasive stories are. In particular, it demonstrates to me how limiting and potentially damaging diagnoses can be. Like many others, reading and watching here has allowed me to reflect on my own biases and where I have allowed myself to be captured by the single story and also where I felt uncomfortable about a story but allowed myself to be persuaded to accept it working in mental health. I hope that I can start to become much more aware of it now as this way of viewing peoples lives makes the most sense to me at present.
I am also curious about how the insights that we have gained through narrative thinking might influence parenting in general. Hi everyone, my name is Sue and I work in schools with children and families in the UK. I feel a commitment to learning more in every day practice and hope to be able to meet up with practitioners in the UK when possible.
A quote which stood out for me was: In particular the descriptions of how she has supported people to make explicit links between justice and grief which is very powerful. It got me questioning the explicit and implicit training I have received about avoiding bringing myself into the conversation.
I also acknowledge the concern raised by a contributor below that talking about your trousers falling down might feel unsafe or inappropriate for some clients but I feel the uderlying principle he modelled is very helpful. The solidarity and the respect of vulnerabilities.
Because I need to adapt this solidarity appropriately for each person with whom I am working. I need to be solid with the light-heartedness as much as with the deadly seriousness of each person in their situations. And I am interpreting lightheartedness sometimes according to its sense of still being alive even though such serious stuff is going on or has occurred. I would like to take the sense of being able to connect with the unspeakable, not to disassociate or be distracted, to stay present with the person. Very much enjoyed exploring the applications of narrative metaphor. The idea of being curious around the foundations and steps that came before really grounds the new theme.
It was really very lovely in high lighting how much choice and agency we have in re-authoring and authoring our own life. I love how the concepts were externalized and personalized in a culturally sensitive and appropriate way. I first came across narrative therapy approaches while working with older people, and I have always been keen to learn more about it.
Too often, I think, we can take control of the therapy room and remove some of the power from the client, coming to conclusions ourselves and offering these to the client as solutions. Narrative therapy is necessarily more collaborative, with the therapist retaining some of the detective role, but giving the client more agency in their role as story-teller. Listening to Chimamanda Adichie, I thought how lucky I was to have been brought up so open-minded, but while reading about thin description I realised just how many single stories I hold about my friends, my family, and myself.
Are the stories we give about who we are multi-stranded, positive and empowering, or are they limiting and bland? It struck me that it must be very hard to know what to say in your first meeting with a therapist: This segment really had me thinking about how refusing to be informed by one story is an act of protest, protesting that a person can be deduced to a singular thread.
I am seeing parallels between narrative and Non-Violent Resistance NVR in that exploring other story lines is an announcement that the individual, family or group and the therapist are no longer willing to accept a one-dimensional view. I find this concept very liberating and can see an immense opportunity for empowering those who have been dis-empowered by being seen in one way.
Through this, I can see how narrative can really lend itself to being combined with multiple modalities and frameworks in an effective therapeutic intervention. I am looking forward to exploring how this looks as I move through this course. I feel that only privileged people would talk about privilege and I think sector workers have a lot of shame about the privilege that they have and the downplay it or play up their marginality.
I used to struggle a lot with shame about apparent privilege but I lost my privilege when I was incarcerated. Privilege for me is something to be cherished not to be ashamed of. Like when I was returning to Melbourne one night on a train and I sat with kids from the country and relised even though I was living in a rooming house I was in fact privileged as I experienced so many opportunities.
Privilege involves cherishing going for a swim this morning. It means remembering to be conscious of as many of the relevant innate prejudices and biases at macro and micro levels. It reminds me to question my own background and journey through my life and how this may influence my thinking. It might be more reflective and more rooted in evidence-based research. It might be more open to examination of where concepts and ideas originate.
I share a similar background to what Mary Heath recounted in her reading — coming from a small country town where intolerance and structural injustice for Aboriginal and migrant families was accepted as the norm. My own journey with critical thinking has been incredibly life-giving, and I can pinpoint key times in my life where I was immersed in intentional communities who taught me to value critical thinking and critical, intentional and meaningful engagement with the world.
Being critical of myself and my role in my community is a strong value of mine now, and something I always want to be promoting in my life and my personal and professional circles. It sounds like externalizing is a practice that supports aligning with the client and walking beside them as opposed to looking down upon them. As stated earlier, the therapist is not the expert but more of a guide who is as interested as the client, in discovering what props up the problem and what gives it legs. Is there an idea or project that stands out to you most at this time?
I really enjoyed reading and learning about the project involving the Tree of Life.
What about this idea or project has sparked your enthusiasm or curiosity? I thought the idea of placing the past, the present, and the future together on a Tree of Life design would make it clear where the children are and where they wanted to go. And having this design in front of them could only be beneficial.
It seems to me, and I have done this myself as well, that most people can tend to float through life without much of a plan nor a record of what they have learned and how to implement that into their lives for the future. By laying it out in this way, it might help the children strive towards a goal to better themselves. And whether they reach that goal is beside the point.
It is the heading of a direction that is beneficial. In what ways might you begin to experiment with these ideas or methodologies? I might try to create my own Tree of Life for myself for the previously mentioned reasons as well as encourage those around me to do the same. My work with residents is within a limited time frame. My greater work with narrative therapy lies with the bereaved and circumstances surrounding their grief.
Thank you so much for providing these videos, forums and materials to draw from. My name is Nyirinkwaya Serge, from Rwanda a small country in East Africa, also known as the country of a thousand hills! I was moved by hearing your wonderful stories on ways of being uncles, mentors, dads, grandfathers and friends.
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I am married and a father of two daughters and one son. Your words were so inspiring for me as I always seek to be a good dad and mentor for. Beyond that, my professional work involves engaging with communities to provide psychosocial support to vulnerable children and young people.
One of the difficulties we encounter is to engage men when in our traditions, child care is mostly attributed to women. So, what you are doing is really unique and admirable, and If you allow me that, I will use your examples as a contribution to how men can find ways of working with children and not be boring!!
I am very sure that this will have a strong impact on the young people you are trying to support. Your initiative reminded me of a personal story where I got support from men that belonged to a same community-based organization as my father before he died. I lost my parents and siblings when I was 16, during the genocide against Tutsis that bloodied our country in My father refused to involve himself in the genocide, so perpetrators from his community came and killed the entire family. I was also injured but could survive. In the period that followed the tragedy, although I did not have suicidal thoughts, but whenever I got through hardships, I would wonder why I survived as if I wished to have died with others.
There was then this man Daniel, that was a friend of my dad, they belonged to the same community-based organization, supporting young girls with vocational skills. Whenever Daniel met me, he would ask how I was feeling, how I was doing at school and if he could be of any support. We did meet only three times in the period I was going through hard times but those were real sparkling moments. He gave me hope, support and reasons to believe in life. Daniel died in but what he did for me, the steps I could achieve from his little support are still memorable.
When I heard about your initiatives, I thought about Daniel. Your messages are so powerful and I can tell you that what you are doing now will have a long-lasting positive affect in ways you cannot imagine, even when you will be no longer alive to see it. The story of my Dad and Daniel illustrates this.
Some of the stories on being a role model for children, being patient with them, talking to them in a non-degrading way, keeping links with kids no matter what, spending good time with them, the desire to offer them the best so that they can see a good future, all this resonated with what my community needs to strengthen. I wonder what children and young people in your communities would say or feel when hearing or watching these films! Can you think about that? Surely, they would be proud of their dads, uncles, grandfathers…!
I have an undergrad in psychology and a dip in art therapy. I am so excited to do this online course and am hoping to deep my knowledge of narrative therapy and develop some skills to use with clients. I would also like to use narrative therapy with in art therapy processes. Walking along side our clients from a place of not-knowing as we support re-construction of their story from thin to thick and rich understanding, sounds like a valuable way to serve others in times of difficulties.
I can really see this being a beneficial process for individuals from all walks of life at all stages of life, particularly within times of crisis and depression. I also picked up so hints of solution focused therapy and jungian psychology. Brothers from the Aboriginal way of being uncles, mentors, dads, grandfathers and friends film series.
I have been blessed to get a chance to watch your conversations on film from the your amazing project. My heart was really opened as I heard men of different ages and experiences discussing what is important to aboriginal men in Australia. As a Black man in the United States your conversations remind me once again that the experience of colonization and the harm it does to our communities is not unique, but also the resistance to colonization and harm is also not unique.
Young People and the Creation of Culture— Victor Wong Cheong-wing
In fact the clearest message I heard from you in the films is the importance of resisting and holding on to culture and community strength. I was particularly happy to watch and listen to Shawn Major in the films talking about his work with young boys and it reminded me of how important re-membering and re-connecting to nature, community, traditions and values is for our mental health and well being.
I also smiled and cried some as I listened to the young men discuss racism and segregation and shared in the experience that I think we Black folk have of using humor to soften our experiences of racism sometimes. I resonated so much with what seemed to be the overall message to me that it is important for us to learn as men to live in peace in the Western world with our own culture. Our cultures are our road to remaining healthy and surviving for the day when we will know complete liberation.
Thank you brothers again for this wonderful series of conversations with the men of your communities. A couple of months ago I completed a two day training course on the topic of domestic and family violence. Two women from the service did a good job providing information and valuable education about the link between family violence and homelessness. The projects that I read about in the on-line course very much reminded me of the work of the staff at Carries Place. What really impresses itself on me is the overlap between narrative ideas and the philosophy of Carries Place having to address patriarchal social structures, and have politics in mind.
Against the background of these political developments a closer look at the argumentations, rhetorics and discourses behind the Turkish dedication towards Sub-Saharan Africa seems in order to provide an encompassing overview about the Turkish foreign policy towards Africa. Naturally, the different actors of this particular political field cannot be ignored in this context since they are themselves dominant figures within the discursive formations. Among the most relevant actors in the field of Turkish foreign policy towards Sub-Saharan Africa are certainly the Turkish foreign aid agency TIKA and the Turkish bureau of religious affairs Diyanet, which both are increasingly active in Africa See for example Ali Besides these state-political actors non-state actors will have to be taken into account as well.
In this context the African engagements of Turkish NGOs, for example in the field of development aid, will have to be named. In a similar way the Turkish economic organizations for an overview see Seufert and the Think Tanks that are both part of the first approaches towards cooperations with African countries Uchehara are important players in this discursive field. Thus, the networks between the different state and non-state actors will have to be considered to provide an overview of the structures of the Turkish foreign policy discourse about Sub-Saharan Africa.
It will describe the attempt to untangle the different political, economic, anticolonial, religious, historical and cultural discourses across intertwined actors via the mass data approach of Topic Modeling across different covariates in a diachronic and synchronic way. Structural Topic Modeling or STM enables the researches to do additional things compared to other topic modeling approaches It allows for the inclusion of metadata i.
This can be done in two ways: Topical prevalence allows us to look at the influence of the metadata on the frequency of a topic i. It can also be used to uncover the latent topic structures of documents. Thus, it can show how specific topics show up closely tied to other topics in a given corpus. Using these three aspects of STM it becomes possible to discover diachronic changes in topics and across actors as well as the topic structuring in the discourse of the examined documents.
Wang The inclusion of metadata allows the researcher to build new and expanded question into his research and make better inferences about relevant issues in the data of the corpus. This mostly theoretical paper will show how these aspects of Structural Topic Modeling can be operationalized for an encompassing discourse analysis of actors in intertwined networks. It aims at showing on a methodological-theoretical level the opportunities of STM can be used to identify changes, similarities and differences between these actors in a discursive network.
Based on a solely Turkish corpus of all available documents, texts and utterances such as for example press releases, activity reports, journals, speeches, etc. Thus, Haslinger points out that topics could be understood as complexes of meaning that are talked about with different opinions. He argues that topics are the foundation of the structure of every form of communication and thus have to be a part of discourse analysis.
Thus, this paper will try to show the methodological possibilities Structural Topic Modeling gives the researcher to undertake a structured analysis of discursive networks, debates and discussions across a multitude of intertwined actors. All this will be done with the already laid out example of Turkish foreign policy in Sub-Saharan Africa.
These discourses are of particular interest, since the Sub-Saharan space is a new field of Turkish foreign policy and the political and societal discourses that support these new developments have only been just developed in Turkish politics. Thus, different actors vie for discursive influence and power over this concrete policy field. Topic Modeling is able to uncover these discursive conflicts and differences.
A New Humanitarian Power? Proceedings of International Conference October , St. Genealogie, Theorie, Anwendungen, Wiesbaden , S. Theorie und Praxis Kritischer Diskursanalyse, Wiesbaden Data-Mining in a Century of Classic Journals, in: Available online under https: Computation, Application, and Evaluation, Available online under http: Navigating the Local Modes of Big Data. The Case of Topic Models, presented on: A Model of Text for experimentation in social sciences Working Paper , Across academic disciplines that study literary and intellectual history there are ongoing discussions of if and when culturally important writers of fiction or non-fiction underwent a personal paradigm shift a Kehre.
The collected writings of philosopher Martin Heidegger, writer Milan Kundera, and theologian Martin Luther, all show indications of such a Kehre. The temporal identification of a Kehre however represents a significant methodological challenge. In this paper, we describe a novel approach to identification of change in the history of highly productive writers. The approach combines information theory and fractal analysis to substantiate claims about an intellectual Kehre as exemplified by the Danish liberal thinker, theologian and romantic writer N.
The corpus consists of the collected writings of N. At a methodological level, we argue that LRD and Information Theory can substantiate qualitative observations of paradigm shifts in cultural systems both at the micro and macro-level. Behaviour, in press. Segmentation and cultural modulation in perception of internal events are not trivial matters.
Religion, Brain, and Behavior, Although some later folklorists have expressed skepticism about these collections, this skepticism is often based on perceived notions of how these collections came to be, rather than a deep exploration of the actual practices of the collectors themselves. We show how techniques from historical Geographic Information Systems hGIS wedded to time tested archival research methods can reveal how a folklore collection came into being.
By detailing the routes taken by the Danish folklore collector Evald Tang Kristensen over the course of his fifty-year career, we trace not only his selection biases for geographic areas and by extension, social and economic classes , but also the impact that intellectual currents, political developments and changes to transportation infrastructure have on his collecting. In this work, we focus on determining how, when and where Tang Kristensen traveled in Denmark as he created his collection. We develop detailed route maps projected onto appropriate historical base maps showing his movement through the countryside.
We develop aggregate statistics that allow us to understand, at a granular level, his collecting habits. In all, we map field collecting trips, starting in and ending in The memoir is based largely on letters he wrote home detailing all of his stops while out collecting, and includes information on means of transportation as well as travel dates. In later work, we will also align field stops with our electronic catalog of informants. As with most historical data, places can be difficult to locate: Contemporary gazetteers are inadequate to the task and often confound, rather than solve, queries.
To derive the final field trip stops, each trip was inspected individually. Since Tang Kristensen occasionally traveled by boat, ferry routes based on ferry schedules and close study of historical maps were also added. By feeding the provisional sequential stops to the network analyst, we were able to create the most likely routes for each trip as a single line record. These routes were then visualized as a line with sequentially numbered stops Fig 2.
The visualization is augmented by simple statistics, such as route length, as well as descriptors from our database, including dates of collection, field diary page ranges, and modes of transportation. Current animations reveal, for example, the numerous times where he backtracked, and can be used to augment the understanding derived from the static maps.
By splitting routes into inter-stop segments, we could develop more detailed statistics regarding segment length, speed of travel, and travel mode. More importantly, we can now aggregate segment statistics and align this information with other data, allowing us to address a broad range of questions. For example, we can see how far Tang Kristensen traveled when he lived in a specific place, his travel distances at different times of year, and his travel distances in different parts of the country. Furthermore, we can consider changes in average travel segment or field trip distance over time.
Future work will align stops with storytellers, allowing us to include story statistics with the field trip statistics. Population data and transportation data will further add to this picture. Topic Models and Field Trip Descriptions. This modeling allows us another method for aggregating field trips. We can then explore the characteristics of field trips associated with a particular topic. This work is a preliminary step toward aligning the field trips with the stories collected on those field trips. By using hGIS techniques, we can provide a degree of detail about his travels missing in earlier studies.
For example, we can move from the micro-consideration of a single field trip, to a meso-consideration of all trips that included a particular parish, to a macro-consideration of all of his trips taken as a whole. Tang Kristensen og tidlig feltforskning i Danmark. National etnografi og folklore Word Spotting is a set of methods for localizing word forms in handwritten text. The project group behind the current abstract has previously used it on medieval Swedish manuscripts, namely on Cod.
Ups C 64 Latin and Cod. C 61 Old Swedish , see Wahlberg et al. The most common usage for Word Spotting is to extract words for different purposes, for instance for linguistic investigations. From a technical perspective, there are several different variants of Word Spotting, but in most cases the searching process is built up on a template of the word form in question being chosen, and then the computer identifies graph sequences in the manuscript, charter etc. For further details on the technical aspects of the method, see below. In the present investigation, the Word Spotting method is used for another purpose, namely scribal attribution, i.
Our material is the medieval Swedish charter corpus in its entirety, as far as they have been photographed more than 10 charters. These are preserved at Svenskt diplomatarium, Riksarkivet. As stated above, the basic concept of the Word Spotting method is that a word template is chosen as a point of reference, from which the other similar word forms are identified.
From a linguistic perspective, the template consists in a graph sequence, as such unique and produced by a certain scribe at a certain time. This means that the template contains some characteristics of the scribe that produced it. For our purpose, the template is not used for identifying all the word forms in the corpus that the template represents, but for identifying the instances when the word forms and individual letters; see below have been executed in a way similar to the template. For the purpose of scribal attribution, not only graph sequences in this case word forms are of interest, but also individual graphs letters.
The shape of letters has for a long time been considered as a key issue for scribal attribution in the palaeographic research. We have therefore focused on the identification of specific letters, and especially those consisting of several components, with a more complicated ductus, more specifically those used by Wiktorsson.
From a technical perspective, the search for individual letters poses a greater challenge than the search for sequences, as the number of measuring points for the former is much smaller. Thus, a great deal of time has been put into optimizing the technical aspects of the method. Therefore, the performance of these techniques highly depends on the accuracy of the line or word segmentation algorithms. To this approach belong the above mentioned Wahlberg et al.
Our approach belongs to this category and we use a so-called sliding window to match the template with the content of the window, in this case the handwritten document being investigated. The unique quality of our approach is that we can perform what has been done for a long period of time in the area known as image registration. In image registration, template images are matched to find identical images. In our case, dealing with handwritten text, this must be done in a different way, since the template and the word within the sliding window are not identical, since all graphs are unique and always displaying some incidental variation, however small.
Therefore, the algorithm must be much more relaxed than in the case of ordinary image registration, i. The current method can be used for searching for both words and graphs, and even for parts of graphs. The fact that there are matches in the Word Spotting and the Letter Spotting process do not automatically lead to the conclusion that the letters have been produced by the same scribe. Instead the matches should be seen as suggestions, to be further evaluated by a human researcher.
The matches represent graph sequences that display similarities with the template regarding the measuring points. This is, however, not always the case, and thus one must evaluate the results of the searches with great care. One great difficulty when dealing with scribal attribution in medieval documents is the absence of ground truth. It is very rare that we know who actually held the pen in these documents, and when the scribes are known, they are in most cases known through earlier attributions. When working with new methods for scribal attribution, it is not satisfactory to rely on previous attributions only.
If one would use previous attributions to evaluate the methods, one would risk going in circle, forming the new methods on the previous work. For that purpose, we have established a set of charters where the scribes have been identified on external evidence, i. Most important are the charters containing a notice from a recording clerk, stating that this person has written the document in his own hand see Wiktorsson These charters function as our point of reference in the searches in the corpus.
The aim of this project is to investigate and map the characteristics of the script and the scribes in the medieval Swedish charters. Within this project, we use several methods, each aiming at measuring certain features of the script see e. Hence, the current Word Spotting investigation should not be seen as one isolated attempt at solving the issue of scribal attribution, but as a part of a large scale mapping of script features. The purpose of this project is not to find one single method that will work as an automatic tool for scribal attribution.
It is through the collected evidence of several methods for measuring script features that a new mapping of the medieval scribes will be achieved. Towards an omnilingual word retrieval system for ancient manuscripts. On the influence of word representations for handwritten word spotting in historical documents. Digital Palaeography and the Old Swedish Script. Word spotting for historical documents. Spotting Words in Medieval Manuscripts. Skrivare i det medeltida Sverige. Old Norse, lexicography, poetry, relational databases, web interfaces. The New Lexicon Poeticum lexiconpoeticum.
It is based on the corpus produced by the Skaldic Project supported project no. His lexicon, based on his own corpus, is therefore founded on a body of material that does not accurately reflect the manuscript evidence.
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It includes a large number of words that only exist through editorial conjecture, and omits large numbers of words that are evidenced in the manuscript tradition, particularly as manuscript variants are largely ignored. This situation has left a significant gap in methodologies between the material evidence of the poetic lexicon and the resources to analyse it. SkP provides the foundation for the current project because it will have re-edited the entire corpus based on current philological and textual editing methodologies. The edition is in the form of a digital resource skaldic.
It links together the normalised, occasionally emended edition with variant readings, manuscripts, secondary literature, prose contexts and previous editions. It includes unnormalised transcriptions of the main manuscripts of the corpus and significant numbers of variant manuscripts. The new resource will be linked directly to these resources, enabling the lexicon to be understood in its complex contexts. ONP, founded in , is the major dictionary of Old Norse. The poetic corpus was specifically excluded from ONP because of the lack of a reliable edition of this material — a lack that is now being addressed by SkP.
ONP has a sophisticated database with a web interface that links the lexicon to the citation index and textual corpus. It uses reliable diplomatic editions and manuscript spellings, but is reliant on those editions rather than the manuscripts themselves. It differs from lemmatised XML texts in that the lemmata headwords are linked to the future dictionary entry. The nature of the corpus is such that there are a very large number of headwords: Lemmatising produces an automatic concordance with a full set of contextual translations.
Owing to the structure of the corpus database, each headword can be linked to its manuscript witnesses and to nominal periphrases kennings in which it occurs. How to create interfaces for linking hundreds of thousands of words to tens of thousands of headwords. All this information must be in a form that can be checked and updated. Some forms of analysis were performed by the original project diction kenningar and heiti , translations, free text variants ; others were not lexical variants, lemmatising, compounds.
As a more general question, how to create a meaningful and useful lexical resource when the original and underlying corpus is so rich in itself, with translation, notes and commentary linked to each word — and how to publish it in the current metrics-driven research environment. The original skaldic project uses a web interface to enter, edit and manage the data of the project. Relational databases differ from XML as there is no inherent connection between the data structure and its digital storage serialisation.
This has the advantage that the data can easily be exported in a number of ways, but direct editing of the data is not easy to perform. Early on I developed a web application for both viewing the edition, browsing the contextual information and editing the data, with customised forms for entering the textual data, and a generic interface for dealing with other information. This allowed editors to produce editions where a putative natural prose order is linked to each text allowing for easier interpretation and potential morphosyntactic analysis , as well as a translation, with each word linked and reordered.
Each stanza has a full set of linked manuscript references, as well as variants linked to both the words and manuscripts. The process of lemmatising has been performed on the original corpus, again facilitated by the user interface. A web form lists all the words in a stanza or block of text. The user can select the lemma if it has the same form as the text, or look up the lemma by entering a search term. Variations in form and spelling are saved and used to prompt the user when they next occur, although all choices must be confirmed manually.
The word list was originally taken from ONP with permission and has been supplemented as new headwords are identified. The new lexicon will include all variant manuscript readings, something that previous lexica poetica have not documented systematically. As the original variants were entered as free text, rather than as words within the data structure for words in the database, the new project needs to add these to the corpus.
To aid this process I have created a web form which uses the variant apparatus in the corpus database to prompt the user to add lexical variants and link them to headwords. This is a complex process, with no direct correspondence between the words linked in the main text and those in the variants, but the interface attempts to analyse the information in the database to facilitate the process. The original word list for the lexicon was copied from ONP almost a decade ago.
The connection between headwords in the two lexica is not reliable but we are making efforts to recover and check this information so that a single interface can be built to both resources. There are still some questions regarding the nature and function of the new lexicon. The process of lemmatising a corpus with translations linked to each word produces already a concordance of all words with a gloss that effectively gives the interpretation of that word by the editor.
Further information about each word can often be found in the notes linked to the word. What, then, does a dictionary entry for the word add to the information already available? Additionally, the prose dictionary ONP will have more comprehensively covered the more common words in the lexicon.
Should LP simply supplement that lexicon, or should it be a full description of the skaldic lexicon in its own right? These questions derive from broader issues about the nature of traditional scholarship as DH methods become increasingly sophisticated. The linking of the rich corpus to dictionary headwords in itself provides an enormous amount of information for each word. The current interface shows all instances of each word with contextual translation and linked notes where relevant, plus compounds.
Words occurring within kennings nominal periphrases are also explained in this context. Additionally, using the linked manuscript information, all manuscripts representing the word in both the base text and variants can be listed. Analysis can be performed on this information to see, for example, the way parts of speech are distributed within each stanza and half-stanza of poetry. We plan to perform more nuanced analyses of the metrics by using the grammatical information linked by this process to identify line types e.
Additional dating information for both the manuscripts and the poetry albeit unreliable at this stage allows us to trace the history of the word in its poetic and material sources. Guidelines for the electronic encoding of medieval Nordic primary sources Bergen: Medieval Nordic Text Archive Menota , Design science, life-based design, design ontologies.
Technology is only valuable to the extent that it can enhance the quality of life. When solving complex engineering problems, it is easy to forget the basic reason why technologies are designed and developed. They are developed to improve the quality of human life. Designing technology to improve the quality of human life requires a multidisciplinary design approach. On one hand, multidisciplinary teams can give designers with a technical background the opportunity to better acquaint themselves with human research by working with human researchers.
On the other hand, human researchers should be more aware of the various roles they can play in the process of designing and developing new technological solutions for people. Human researchers can be provided with concepts, facts, methods and theories that are useful in many aspects of design. A study of multitude of HTI paradigms illustrates that one can integrate them into four research programs characterized each by a separate design question. The traditional HTI design discourses can thus be systematized by showing that HTI design thinking must always meet four fundamental design questions:.
As these fundamental questions are necessarily present when designing the human dimension of technology, it is useful to understand the logic behind them. The questions define the basic tasks in HTI design: The latter is always present in design, either consciously or tacitly. The first question in HTI design concerns how the behaviour functionalities of a technical artefact can be controlled. How should the artefact be manoeuvred so that it can reach its expected state or carry out the expected processes?
During a human action, an expected state can refer to a process that makes it possible for the user to reach her goal. In this sense, the expected state of a sailing boat can be as much about sailing on the sea as reaching a destination. How to control the behaviour of a technical artefact is a fundamental problem in HTI design.
No technical artefact can exist without providing its users the methods to use it. The problem can be called technical UI. First, the behaviour of the artefact must be logically linked to the human action in question. In the case of a lift, this often refers to the set of control buttons referring to which floor the lift should stop on.
However, the latter presupposes design knowledge of how people use the artefact. This problem can be called usability. This problem concerns the human dimension of the user interface and opens up a new set of questions and sub-questions that can be answered with the help of human research and underlying psychological concepts. In order to guarantee smooth and easy interaction, user interface architectures should explicitly organize dialogues.
For example, elements with similar functions should be associated in a sense-making manner. The foundations of understandable user interfaces can be searched from human research — that is, answers to such questions as why a particular architecture is favoured over another. However, interaction is not only cognitive but there are many dynamic aspects to be discussed in design.
Emotions are important, as they define the human position towards specific issues Frijda, In design, the question is not only about positive emotions but also about asking which emotions are relevant in the particular interaction situation. One should be able to feel angry when the cause is irritating enough and happy when experiencing positive actions. Otherwise, the human emotional system does not operate in a rational manner. In interaction design, it is essential to consider how people experience a situation or event that arouses their emotional responses Frijda, Designers mostly strive to create a positive mood in their clients when interacting with the product.
To understand the emotional dimensions of human experience it is necessary to understand human emotions and motivation, which is closely linked with emotions. People often pursue positive mental states, and are therefore motivated to use artefacts that help them do so. The motives for doing something can be complex and long lasting. The modern psychology of motivation offers a sophisticated framework for analysing the motives for using technologies The importance of this sub-discourse is obvious: Finally, it is essential to ask, what is a technology intended to be used for, in the first place?
One can call this problem designing for life. Why is it used? Answering these questions is a prerequisite for successful interaction design, and calls for an understanding of the life settings that the artefact is intended to support. Form of life is a system of actions in a specific life setting with its rules and regularities, and facts and values that explain the sense of individual deeds and practices in them.
In HTI design, innovative thought processes are often more or less unorganized. Because of hectic design cycles, interaction designers do not necessarily have the time to apply systematic methods or use scientific knowledge to construct interface. Although it is common in engineering design to apply the laws of nature and other scientific facts, this approach is unfortunately not often taken in HTI design. If an organization wishes to exploit scientific knowledge in interaction design processes, it is important to create systematic procedures for doing so, for example by defining the relationships of relevant design concepts and questions and organizing design processes around them.
The concept of usability, for example, opens up a large set of questions and sub-questions that can be both general and product specific in nature. Knowledge management in design has been a topical issue for some time Gero, Traditionally, ontologies have mainly been used to describe the structures of some domains as facts. For example, some products have been described as sets of elements and relations. In such instances, ontologies have had the role of information storage and retrieval. However, when considering design as a dynamic thought process, it is more worthwhile to discuss ontology as a question structure to be used to manage design problems.
Ontologies in this sense can be seen as tools for creative thought rather than as information storage. Ontologies for HTI design can thus be used to generate sets of design questions describing the interaction — that is, the questions that must always be answered when a technology and its relationship to users is designed — and to conduct the HTI design process accordingly. As concepts, questions and ontologies provide a means of managing corporate thinking and making corporate knowledge explicit. When thought processes are explicit, it is possible to support them, to provide correct knowledge to thinking, to foster innovations and to move tacit knowledge from one process to another.
The answering to the four fundamental questions presupposes by far unified argumentation based on human research. What are ontologies, and why do we need them? Intelligent Systems and their Applications, 14, 20—6. A knowledge representation schema for design. AI Magazine, 11, 26— The laws of emotion. American Psychologist, 43, — The proposed paper is based on the research which arose from a collaboration between three of us working respectively on the writing and reception of medieval Icelandic legendary histories Rowbotham ; transmission history and applications of digital tools in philological research Kapitan ; and understanding the manuscript context for prose and poetic texts Wills.
We discovered that we had between us access to enough data and expertise to remarkably expand on previous analyses of the relationships between Old Norse texts as preserved in medieval and later manuscripts and, furthermore, that these analyses could be used to refine our definitions of literary genres and the place of individual texts within those categories. Despite their opposing conclusions, the consensus among these scholars is that the codicological context of these texts is key to understanding the genre they represent. Therefore, we have decided to look at all available manuscript descriptions collected in handrit.
The method we have pursued for identifying genre association has been to analyse the complex manuscript context of these texts, on the basis that analysis of this context helps to inform our understanding of the genre classification of medieval Norse literature. The approach we have developed has been applied across the corpus to understand genre relationships as represented by the manuscript tradition.
Our paper focuses on an interpretation of the relationships between Old Norse texts based on a statistical analysis of digitized manuscript descriptions. Further data came from other projects: The Dictionary of Old Norse Prose ONP has produced a comprehensive list of works within the scope of that project published in their Registre volume and with subsequent revisions , along with detailed information about the manuscripts for each work including the dating of the manuscripts and location of each work within the manuscript.
This data was supplied to the Skaldic Project and has also been used with permission here. The Skaldic Project itself has supplemented the manuscript information with the poetry relevant to that project and other manuscripts that were not recorded in the ONP data tables. The ONP and Skaldic Project manuscript information is structured with texts linked to the manuscripts using a relational database model. One of the challenges for addressing this question is taking the complex manuscript descriptions, constructed as TEI XML, and extracting the relationships between the texts contained within them.
The manuscript descriptions from fasnl. In order to build a visualisation and analysis of the relationships between texts and genres we have had to define these relationships ourselves. We describe firstly how one particular genre, the legendary sagas, was supplemented and normalised.
Secondly, we describe how manuscript data from the fasnl. An open source visualisation software, Gephi, was used to analyse connections between texts. A network of relationships between all the texts was achieved by application of ForceAtlas2 layout Jacomy et. ForceAtlas2 is a force directed layout in which nodes repulse each other like magnets while edges attract the nodes they connect like springs, in case of our network, inspired by RIDD-network presented by Hall , texts are represented as nodes, while edges represent manuscripts.
The thicker is the edge between two texts the bigger is a number of manuscripts in which these texts appear together. Further analysis weights the connections between texts according to length using page counts , as a large number of very small texts i. Network of Icelandic literature. The data collected and visualised is of great value to the study of medieval Icelandic literature, but the great volume of it presents a significant challenge to researchers wishing to provide a detailed philological analysis.
To begin to analyse the data, we decided to take a small number of texts as case studies and, marrying the approaches of philological research with those of the digital humanities, examine relationships between an individual fornaldarsaga and the texts it is linked to in the manuscript transmission. Heroic sagas and ballads. Stories for all time Poject: Digital Culture, Meme, Ethics. In this society, the cultural participants are not interested in being passive consumers Kolb, of culture, rather they recreate culture by reusing, remixing, and recirculating it.
One of the intrinsic character of the internet society is using images to convey sentiments, often ranging from cynicism to humorous, often on contemporary issues, referred as meme refer Fig 1. In fact, this simplified, clear and concise way of expressing complex sentiments is an essential and indispensable part of the contemporary digital culture.
The word meme was introduced by Dawkins , s. He noted that meme is the new replicator, a noun that conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation. The creation of meme does not require any particular artistic skills, only connection to the internet and hence, can be created, circulated and consumed by anyone. This reflects the freedom to participate envisioned by Berners-Lee , s. However, this does not diminish the popularity of such images. Shifman raised a few question regarding this issue: Why are so many people investing so much effort inventing it?
Why do some of these amateur imitations attract millions of viewers? One of the possible reason for their popularity may be that it is minimalistic, therefore, an easy way of catching attention. Moreover, the relationship to contemporary issues further adds to its popularity. Lastly, the attempts to humor-ise even the immoral situations may also be the reason of its popularity. Indeed, every age looks at the past in a different way. However, the question is whether this creation and consumption degenerates the original content or enhances it by utilising amateur and untrained yet skilful people.
This paper will examine the reuse of medieval paintings in the internet age. It will examine various typologies of reuse to represent the contemporary sentiments. Lastly, the paper will examine ethics related to circulation of such images in the internet. Web corpus, Universal Dependencies, big data, corpus linguistics, natural language processing.
This paper presents the Finnish Internet Parsebank FIP , a freely available web-crawled corpus of Finnish, its user interface as well as some recent studies enabled by it. The FIP consists of nearly 4 billion words automatically collected from the Web. It has full morphological and dependency syntax analyses. On the word-level, this includes the part-of-speech classes of the words and their morphological features such as noun, singular and genitive , and on the sentence-level, the sentence structure and the syntactic functions of the words in it such as nominal subject.
These are marked following the Universal Dependencies UD scheme, a syntactic model seeking cross-linguistically consistent annotations and attested on 47 languages. The UD allows for novel insights to many linguistic research problems by enabling their study across languages. For instance, the characteristics of different texts can be analysed not only in one language but across several languages. Also, many language-technology applications, such as machine translation, profit from these harmonised markings.
The FIP is available through a user interface at http: The advanced user interface is described in detail in Luotolahti et al. Also searches with restrictions are possible such as verbs without a subject. The interface returns the sentences including the searched expression as well as its linguistic contexts. The search hits can also be downloaded. In addition to the FIP, the user interface includes several other language resources, such as corpora in other languages following the UD scheme. The currently available version of the FIP is in total composed of 3,,, words.
These include 28,, lemmata, 39,, unique words and ,, sentences. The FIP was collected using two methods. First, all Finnish texts were detected from the release of the Common Crawl dataset. Common Crawl is a U. Second, we launched a dedicated web crawl targeting Finnish data, not delimited to the. The crawl was realised using the SpiderLing crawler which is designed for collecting linguistic data. For the linguistic analysis of the data, the raw texts were first segmented to sentences and words with a sentence splitter and tokenizer developed using the Apache OpenNLP toolkit trained on our previously manually developed language resource, the Turku Dependency Treebank TDT Haverinen et al.
The part-of-speech classes of the words and their morphological features were assigned with the Marmot tagger Mueller et al. An evaluation of this analysis pipeline showed an accuracy of The dependency syntax analysis on the sentence structure is carried out using the parser of Bohnet et al. The parser performance is Thanks to its size, linguistic variation and the syntactic analyses, the FIP allows for novel possibilities for all disciplines working on textual data.
These methods allow as well the automatic identification of for instance machine translations and informal texts from the FIP Laippala et al. In addition, the FIP has been applied for the study of very rare linguistic constructions, typical in spoken or informal language varieties not necessarily found in traditional, manually collected corpora.
For example, Huumo et al. Another line of investigation that utilizes the data available in the FIP concerns the representation of clausal semantics using neural networks, specifically, modeling the semantic fit of arguments in a transitive construction. The implemented neural network builds a semantic representation for a transitive construction based on word2vec Mikolov, et al. We are currently testing the performance of the implemented model in several tasks such as cloze task and modeling reading times using eye-tracking.
The morphosyntactic analysis of the FIP allows us to model transitive construction and, importantly, even rare verbs occur with sufficient quantity that makes it possible to build semantic representations for them. Finally, the FIP data has been used to improve the language technology available for the Finnish language, especially machine translation MT. A better language model as well as a reinflection generation model were induced from the FIP data, resulting in an improved MT performance especially for the English to Finnish direction.
Top accuracy and fast dependency parsing is not a contradiction. Building the essential resources for Finnish: Language Resources and Evaluation, 48 3: Empirical approaches to cognitive linguistics: Dependency profiles as a tool for big data analysis of linguistic constructions: A case study of emoticons. Journal of Estonian and Finno-Ugric Linguistics.
Approaches to Baltic Finnic. Sentence-initial discourse markers in the Finnish Internet. In TextLink Handbook. Detecting Translations and Informality. Association for Computational Linguistics, 51— Juhani and Hakala, Kai and Ginter, Filip Modeling cloze probabilities and selectional preferences with neural networks. Distributional semantics and linguistic theory, August 08—15, in Bolzano, Italy. Efficient higher-order CRFs for morphological tagging. Modularisation of Finnish finite-state language description—towards wide collaboration in open source development of a morphological analyser.
Universal Dependencies for Finnish. The mass digitizing activities of holdings of tradition archives carried out over the last few decades have introduced a significant amount of various digitized cultural artefacts to the wider public. As information technology has developed, knowledge of how tradition archive materials could and should be digitally maintained has advanced as well. Folklore archivists have developed and sought digital platforms appropriate for their specific collections and suitable solutions for virtual representation, further processing, and re- using of digitized data not only to ensure long-term preservation of the cultural artefacts and creating new access routes to collections, but also to remain close to contributors as well as to continue the archiving of new vernacular knowledge.
In recent years, projects providing tools and inviting volunteers to transform digital content from one format into another have become one of the most widespread phenomena among Digital Humanities research and cultural heritage institutions. One such tool is transcription, which is still one of the most common forms of crowdsourcing in digital humanities. The benefits of such collaborative activities for tradition archives are apparent as the most historical tradition archives consist of vast quantities of handwritten or type-script text collections that cannot be automatically transformed digitally.
By turning manuscript images into digital texts, documented knowledge becomes available not only by the metadata created by the archive system but also by its content. Although the number of crowdsourcing projects are substantially increasing in the digital humanities and cultural heritage fields, tradition archives have not yet been as eager to carry out transcription crowdsourcing projects. However, the experiences of those few tradition archives that have managed to launch crowdsourcing campaigns for folklore manuscript transcription, such as the Irish National Folklore Collection University College Dublin and the Archives of Latvian Folklore Institute of Literature, Folklore and Art, University of Latvia , are impressively positive.
The Talka website randomly displays manuscript pages in a slider carousel, providing users with an easy way of finding the most suitable files for transcription. In addition, simple game elements were included to provide additional incentives for younger-generation users to engage, i. However, each of the transcribed pages was carefully proofread by the editors, corrected, and accepted or deleted if the submitted transcription proved to be fraudulent.
User involvement analysis indicates a remarkable disproportion of engagement activity among Talka participants. A medium level of activity was demonstrated by Online publishing, open science, correspondences. The online edition is the conclusion of several decades of research, of transcribing and digitizing letters and of writing commentaries. The extensive source material together with the priority on prompt publication and the small staff made it necessary to find a publishing platform that would require relatively light modification and would be easy to manage, and where the process of importing the source material could be easily automatized.
However, this was found to be too labour-intensive and complex. The SKS had prior experience with Omeka, the open-source web-publishing platform for the display of library, museum, archives, and scholarly collections and exhibitions. A trial period demonstrated that this platform was the best option available for the planned publication. As an open-source tool, Omeka is low cost and does not involve complex permission and copyright issues.
Some image viewer plugins are useable for displaying the facsimile images for each document. TEI5 enables detailed encoding of the source material. However, the project group decided on a light encoding of the transcriptions. Information contained in the transcriptions, such as personal and place names, is left unmarked.
Similarly, for example different kinds of additions of text above lines, in the margins etc. This is partially to do with the extensive amount of manual work such detailed encoding require, and partially with the functionality provided by the publication. The open text search provides easier and quicker access to the same information as the encoding would.
The TEI documents will be made available as free downloads, which enables researchers and other users to modify them for their own purposes. A researcher who uses digitized letters as source material is faced with some challenges related to the material and its context. We ask what kind if information is lost in using online publications, where the materiality of the letters and their connection to the real-life physical objects in the archive are weakened.
Can a good interface help convey information about the original letters and the entity they form in the archive? To make digitized material understandable and meaningful, we need to provide as much contextual information as possible, e. Also contextual information on the text of the letters is required to help the reader understand the meanings within the text itself and the circumstances of letter writing. Therefore, we will reflect on how our perceptions could be widened, and possibly changed, by the complete digital edition of the correspondence.
We will show the benefits the tool offers in comparison to the traditional methods of accessing this kind of source material, as well as address the potential limitations that might arise from the technical solutions adopted. The benefits and potential limitations are related to how the material is displayed and what kind of search tools are provided.
Are the digitized letters and their transcriptions easily accessible and are features such as zooming in on the facsimiles or moving from page to page within a letter easy to use? How can we help scholars make new interpretations based on digitized material? In , the field of digital history in Finland saw a tremendous development see Parland-von Essen , and in many ways this has continued ever since. On its steering board, the project involves several of the most active Finnish digital historians who as a group also felt the need for and came up with the idea of the project amidst this fast development.
In this paper, we aim to discuss some key questions and challenges firstly in its own work and goals, and secondly in the field of digital history research in Finland in general. Further, we aim to place these Finnish developments within the context of the larger digital humanities as well as history movement in the Nordic countries. The project work started in February Its information gathering, including interviews, are carried on from March onwards.
The online inquiry was open from late April till end of June It was widely advertised with for example articles written in both Swedish and Finnish. Altogether seventeen 17 persons responded to the inquiry. This somewhat low number of respondents will be complemented by results from other recent surveys and user studies of which there are a few.
Moreover, several critical issues were identified, namely creating better, up-to-date information channels of digital history resources and events, providing relevant education, skills, and teaching by historians, and the need to help historians and information technology specialists to meet and collaborate better and more systematically than before. Meanwhile there is a lot happening in the field of digital history that should and will be somehow included in the mapping.
This now on-going project should have fresh results from mapping this fast changing domain and compiling a roadmap for it by the time of the possible presentation in Gothenburg in mid-March The presentation could fit with the conference subtheme of The Digital, the Humanities, and the Philosophies of Technology. Our scholarly perspective comprises of research in the history of science and technology and to some extend science and technology studies.
Palgrave Macmillan, New York Med varm hand Stockholm, , This paper will explore the dynamic relationship between artistic practices and digital humanities in the creation of an online platform launched in to commemorate the th year anniversary of the parliamentary abolition of the Transatlantic Slave Trade in Britain. It will consider how orality was used in the process of selecting and digitising archival material related to the history of performing arts produced by people of the African diaspora in the UK.
More specifically, the way in which African oral traditions and techniques of storytelling played a role in the process of designing and constructing the first online exhibition on the legacy of the Transatlantic Slave Trade in British performing arts and society. The selection process was based on consultation with a number of lecturers, students, artists, community group representatives, academics and experts in the field. The process was meant to open up the curatorial practice and move it towards current forms of public engagement, co-creation and democratic participation in knowledge production.
The paper will discuss how this approach bore direct consequences on the creation of the online platform, with regards to its design, as well as the kind of archive material, which was made accessible for the first time on the online platform. The critical question was not only to include voices from outside the heritage sector, but also to re-mould the practice of archiving and the representation of archival material, as well as to resist the tendency of objectifying the past within rigid co-ordinates of time and space. The paper will discuss the involvement of black artists in the curatorial process as a way of privileging a synchronic rather than diachronic approach to history and memory.
This resulted in a number of essays on art forms originated in Africa, which were produced by a number of artists of African descent living in the UK, not only to provide a critical and historical context to the exhibition, but also to shift its focus from the object of the analysis to the discourse that produces it. The paper will also discuss how the heritage of the Transatlantic Slave Trade within British performing arts and society was set against the wider context of cultural identity and performance, and in particular contemporary forms of migration and human trade in Britain.
To do so it will analyse the Voices section of the exhibition, which juxtaposed the experiences of 18th century African abolitionists Olaudah Equiano and Mary Prince, extracted from their autobiographical accounts, to the testimonies of two present day migrants from China and Russia named as Natasha and Liu to protect their real identities.