Storytelling is everyday information behavior that, when it goes wrong, can propagate misinformation. From accurate data to misinformed stories, what goes wrong with the process? This chapter focuses on the dynamics of storytelling in misinformation as a problematic aspect of the COVID-19 pandemic in three widely circulated problematic stories. Storytelling offers a framework for researching collective experiences of information as a process that is inherently based in communities, with knowledge commons that are instantiated by the telling and retelling of stories, temporarily or permanently. To understand how difficult information is to govern in story form and through storytelling dynamics, this chapter uses storytelling theory to explore three recent cases of COVID-19 misinformation related to medicine misuse, exploiting vaccine hesitancy, and aftermath of medical racism. Understanding what goes wrong with these stories may be key to public health communications that engage effectively with communitiesÕ everyday misinformation challenges.Ê

The Introduction lays out connections between Parables unique to Luke and stories about Israel’s founding families. Like Jesus who looked to stories of Israel’s origins when explaining matters relating to himself, Luke reworked well-known Genesis texts to convey ideas.

As a field of knowledge History is exceptionally interested in the particular and specific rather than the universal and general – it is primarily idiographic rather than nomothetic. It is also centrally concerned with change over time. These two characteristics make History fundamentally a storytelling discipline. Its findings are most often presented in narrative form. Of course, many books do not follow one narrative from cover to cover. But research findings are most often presented as stories – not as reports of particular key results (as, for example, in a scientific lab report) or as the results of statistical analysis. Nomothetic disciplines tend toward examining a relatively narrow set of features of multiple cases in order to create generalizing theories and establish laws of regularity that define what will happen under a given set of circumstances at any and all times and places. History instead usually aims to organize into a coherent interpretation many features of a single case, exploring in detail what happened at a particular time, in a particular place. It often also aims to give us a complex, multifactor causal explanation of why it happened as it did, but usually that causal explanation is embedded in the narrative.

This autobiographical fragment begins in a working-class high school and traces a career trajectory shaped by the world I grew up in and the world I entered. As a White woman from an American working-class background, I was an uneasy fit for the academy, circa 1979. I experienced obstacles and intellectual pleasures. I found many fascinating topics to study (e.g., class and cultural variation in early narrative) and many fascinating colleagues and students to work with. The outsider/insider position I occupied offered novel vantage points on the what, who, and how of developmental inquiry and on its telling omissions. My story of marginalization intersected with a historical moment when developmental psychology began to reckon with its narrowness and ethnocentrism. Thanks to the efforts of many developmental scholars, the field is now headed in a more context-sensitive and pluralistic direction while still contending with entrenched deficit discourses and other blind spots.

This chapter argues that the 1870s witnessed the final hegemony of a cause-and-effect form of thick temporality that arguably still dominates our lives. It asks if digital tools open up alternative ways of thinking about chronology, our experience of time, and the possibility of action. The chapter examines two digital projects that change how we approach the 1870s: Britain, Representation, and Nineteenth-Century History or BRANCH at branchcollective.org, and Collaborative Organization for Virtual Education or COVE at covecollective.org.

The book so far has focused on the interaction between L2 and L1 speakers in Chapters 2 to 4 and on how distinct those interactions are, given the same tasks, compared to interactions between L1 and L1 speakers. However, we have no sense of how naturalistic the interactions in the exams that are the focus of these chapters are. In this chapter we present a short-text MDA of discourse units in general conversational English, using the BNC 2014 as our data. The analysis reveals a range of discourse functions at both the micro- and macro-structural levels.

Valérie-Inès de La Ville and Eléonore Mounoud outline a narrative approach to strategy as practice. They draw on the work of Paul Riceour and Michel de Certeau to elucidate the various narrative practices that constitute an inherent part of strategy and strategizing. This involves the production of texts in strategy formulation, but also the consumption of texts in the ‘implementation’ of strategies. They offer a model that focuses on the writing and reading of texts and narratives as ongoing activities in organizations. This view allows one to understand the crucial role of strategy texts and ongoing interpretations in strategizing – and thus challenges the conventional view that focuses on formal strategies without considering the ways in which they are ‘talked into being’.

This chapter explores the actual reading event. It considers what kinds of pleasure readers seek from book reading and rereading (in different settings and at different times), and the ways in which an e-book does or does not deliver such satisfactions. Examining aspects such as tactile dimensions of embodied reading, the role of the material object, convenience and access, optimisation and customisation, and narrative immersion, it contextualises original findings with recent empirical research on screen reading and offers insights on how, where, and when intimacy, sense of achievement, and the feeling of being ‘lost in a book’ can be found in e-reading. Pleasures such as immersion and sense of achievement appear to be impeded by digital for some readers but facilitated for others. The chapter further examines how an e-book can be framed as an incomplete book (frequently as ‘content’ or ‘story’ and hence the ‘most important part’) without losing its power to satisfy.

In this chapter we explore a manually annotated subset of data from the corpora studied in this book, which have been analysed to show the presence of narratives as understood by researchers studying this concept. In this narrative study we return to an exploration of differences arising from L1 and cultural background and, inter alia, conclude that cultural background may have an important role to play in the frequency and nature of narrative. In drawing such conclusions, we refer, where appropriate, to existing research on SLA and narrative. Overall, the study suggests that, while there are similarities between L1 and L2 narrative use, there are also differences, some attributable to the learner, others to the task/context in which the data was gathered.

So far in the book the concept of narrative has been left largely unexplored except in so far as it has arisen as a functional labelling of data emerging from the short-text MDA of the corpora examined. However, while these labels were applied using the expertise of linguists, the fit between narrative so described and narrative as studied by linguists is unclear. This chapter sets the background for the examination of narrative, as defined by the model of Labov and Waletzky, both by introducing the model and working through an example of the intersection of these researchers’ approach to narrative and the micro- and macro-structural analyses in our data.

The concluding chapter of this book aims to remind the reader of the purpose of the book, which is to help BSL learners to improve their sign articulation accuracy, recognise the kinds of errors they are likely to make, and gain a better understanding of the visual nature of BSL. The importance of practice to enhance fluency is emphasised in Section 5.1, which also encourages the learner to make every effort to understand the cultural aspects of the social life and everyday lived experiences of Deaf people. Section 5.2 contains a good number of exercises that incorporate aspects of the previous three chapters so that you can continue working on the areas that you have identified for improvement. Each exercise contains a clear aim and provides activities with instructions that will help you to continue improving your sign articulation. This chapter emphasises the fact that the ability to recognise and correct your errors is an important part of the learning journey. It helps you to self-reflect and stay on track with the development of your BSL skills as you progress further on your journey to becoming a fluent BSL user.