Navigating Stories in Times of Transition

Introduction: In this paper, we present the project Navigating Stories in Times of Transition, a collaboration between the University of Twente and the Netherlands eScience Center. The project aims to make state-of-the-art tools for natural language processing available to researchers in the social sciences and humanities (SSH). The tools we develop advance multidisciplinary approaches to analyzing stories across different media and time. We are particularly interested in further developing digital story grammar, a computational method for narrative analysis (Andrade & Andersen, 2020). We want to show how an analysis of personal narratives collected in the times of COVID-19 pandemic with our computerized narrative tools will help researchers to chart how people make sense of the pandemic and respond to its socio-political framings in uncertain times (Murray & Sools, 2014). We will embed our tools in relevant infrastructures to make them sustainable for future use (such as CLARIAH or the SSH Open Marketplace). As a platform for integrating the tools, we use Orange, a modular data mining toolkit (Demšar et al., 2013).Current practices: Narrative researchers already use several software programs, such as Atlas.ti and NVivo for qualitative data analysis, LIWC for automatic text analysis, and Excel, R, SPSS, and Stata for statistical analysis. In the past decade, automated natural language analysis tools have become available that could be useful for narrative analysis. Whereas several methods for natural language analysis (e.g., named entity recognition and sentiment analysis) have already been integrated into various tools used for narrative research studying textual data in English, the situation is direr for other languages. In addition, the application of more advanced approaches such as semantic role labelling and digital story grammar requires programming ability, which prevents broad application.Goals: We aim at making digital story grammar available for other languages than English. In our initial work, we have developed crude versions of digital story grammar based on semantic role labelling for Dutch, Danish and German. Our next work has two objectives. First, inspired by narrative methodology, we want to extend our tools to advance the analysis from the level of sentences to the story level. Second, to register changes in narratives in response to societal events, we intend to enable comparative analyses across time and space with computational methods. Initially, we will focus on analyzing the dynamic relationship between narratives and societal conditions during the COVID-19 pandemic.Concluding remarks: Our project aims at making state-of-the-art tools for natural language processing and data visualization available to SSH researchers. In our initial work, we have developed a new version of digital story grammar for the languages of Dutch, Danish and German. Our project will extend the digital toolbox for narrative analysis and thus support researchers in studying larger volumes of digital texts. All software produced by the project will be open source and we strive to balance usability and complexity when developing our tools for narrative research

Analysis of the Emails From the Dutch Web-Based Intervention “Alcohol de Baas”:Assessment of Early Indications of Drop-Out in an Online Alcohol Abuse Intervention

Nowadays, traditional forms of psychotherapy are increasingly complemented by online interactions between client and counselor. In (some) web-based psychotherapeutic interventions, meetings are exclusively online through asynchronous messages. As the active ingredients of therapy are included in the exchange of several emails, this verbal exchange contains a wealth of information about the psychotherapeutic change process. Unfortunately, drop-out-related issues are exacerbated online. We employed several machine learning models to find (early) signs of drop-out in the email data from the “Alcohol de Baas” intervention by Tactus. Our analyses indicate that the email texts contain information about drop-out, but as drop-out is a multidimensional construct, it remains a complex task to accurately predict who will drop out. Nevertheless, by taking this approach, we present insight into the possibilities of working with email data and present some preliminary findings (which stress the importance of a good working alliance between client and counselor, distinguish between formal and informal language, and highlight the importance of Tactus' internet forum)

Understanding Therapeutic Change Process Research Through Multilevel Modeling and Text Mining

Online interventions hold great potential for Therapeutic Change Process Research (TCPR), a field that aims to relate in-therapeutic change processes to the outcomes of interventions. Online a client is treated essentially through the language their counsellor uses, therefore the verbal interaction contains many important ingredients that bring about change. TCPR faces two challenges: how to derive meaningful change processes from texts, and secondly, how to assess these complex, varied, and multi-layered processes? We advocate the use text mining and multi-level models (MLMs): the former offers tools and methods to discovers patterns in texts; the latter can analyse these change processes as outcomes that vary at multiple levels. We (re-)used the data from Lamers et al. (2015) because it includes outcomes and the complete online intervention for clients with mild depressive symptoms. We used text mining to obtain basic text-variables from e-mails, that we analyzed through MLMs. We found that we could relate outcomes of interventions to variables containing text-information. We conclude that we can indeed bridge text mining and MLMs for TCPR as it was possible to relate text-information (obtained through text mining) to multi-leveled TCPR outcomes (using a MLM). Text mining can be helpful to obtain change processes, which is also the main challenge for TCPR. We showed how MLMs and text mining can be combined, but our proposition leaves open how to obtain the most relevant textual operationalization of TCPR concepts. That requires interdisciplinary collaboration and discussion. The future does look bright: based on our proof-of-concept study we conclude that MLMs and text mining can indeed advance TCPR

Wonder, education, and human flourishing:Theoretical, empirical, and practical perspectives

The premise that underlies this volume is that there are strong interconnections between wonder, education and human flourishing. And more specifically, that wonder can make a significant difference to how well one’s education progresses and how well one’s life goes. The contributors to this volume – both senior, well-known and beginning researchers and students of wonder – variously explore aspects of these connections from philosophical, empirical, theoretical and practical perspectives. The three chapters that comprise Part I of the book are devoted to the importance of wonder for education and for human flourishing. Part II contains four chapters offering conceptual analyses of wonder and perspectives from developmental psychology and philosophy (Spinoza, Wittgenstein, philosophy of religion). The seven chapters that form Part III contain a wealth of ideas and educational strategies to promote wonder in education and teacher education. This volume not only underlines and articulates the importance of wonder in education and in life but also offers fresh perspectives, allowing us to look with renewed wonder at wonder itself

Using narrative futuring as a means of facing liminal employment status and space.

Unemployment and precarious employment have been treated as liminal states where people’s everyday lives are rendered into an “in-between” position, a place where the uncertainty of meaning and decision-making prevail. Liminality has also been applied as a way of understanding a changing social world, implying a transformation in consciousness emanating from prolonged indeterminism. To develop a clearer understanding of coping with liminal status, we used a narrative futuring approach (i.e., a reflexive practice to elicit narratives from the viewpoint of a desired future). Twenty “letters from the future” were written by unemployed and precariously employed young adults with higher education degrees living in Crete. The letters engaged the participants in the process of critical reflection, where they imagined eutopian lifeworlds by attempting to place the prevalent “crisis story” in the background, embracing or confronting liminal status. Implications focus on how the narrative future-making approach can be applied to disentangle the complexities involved in understanding liminal states and their inherent transformative potential where both personal, interpersonal, and the broader social and societal context come into awareness

The Emergence of Meaning From Meaningful Moments in Life

Meaningful moments are specific events in life that are felt to be of great value and significance. This empirical study presents a framework on the way a sense of meaning emerges from these moments. Out of an existing data set of narratives of meaningful moments, a purposeful sample of nine narratives was chosen from different participants, all middle-aged, higher educated, and with an interest or profession in personal development. Interviews were conducted about the way these moments were experienced to be meaningful. A holistic content analysis led to the distinction of five main themes in the process of meaning emergence. The study showed how meaning discovery may lead to meaning creation, which in turn may lead to retrospective meaning discovery. Results highlighted the crucial role of the awareness of contrasts and letting go. Finally, the study showed a variety of ways in which meaningful moments have a lasting impact on life. The value of the developed framework lies in its focus on meaning as a process, integrating the concepts of coherence, purpose, significance and self-transcendence, and illustrating how meaning emerges through forward acts and discoveries as well as in retrospect