Watching storytelling

Methods for collecting stories by observing people, either in their daily lives or in a special group session, draw heavily from ethnography and participant observation. The only difference here is that the observer takes special note of stories told and interactions surrounding storytelling events. One important difference between collecting stories this way and asking people directly for them is that the observer needs to pay attention to social cues in order to answer questions about stories. Of course, nobody can deny that answering questions about stories yourself inserts your own bias. One way to minimize bias is to write questions for observation that capture things going on during the storytelling event. For example, some valid questions might be:

• Did the storyteller laugh during this story? When?
• Did anyone in the audience laugh during this story? When?
• What source did the storyteller give for the story?
• Was there a silence after the storytelling finished? How long was it? What ended it?
• Did anyone interrupt the telling of the story? (when, who, why)
• What part of the story was told with the strongest emotion by the storyteller?
• In what part of the story did the audience listen with the most attention?
• Was there a part of the story that seemed to be ignored by the audience?

You could then look at patterns in those questions, because they would be patterns of interpretation by the people whose opinions you care about - the storyteller and audience.

Gleaning stories from previously collected texts

In some circumstances you may not be able to ask people to tell stories, but you may have access to conventional interviews or records of their conversations. You may still be able to glean enough stories from what they said to carry out a story project.

There are some fairly simple techniques for finding stories among records of spoken or written text:

• Look for past tense verbs, like "said" and "did".
• Look for personal pronouns like "he" and "she" and "we".
• Look for story-starting statements: a reference to a time ("one day"), memory ("I remember when"), experience ("I had" or "I did"), action ("I went"), event ("It rained"), place ("That house"), person ("He liked to") or rumor ("I heard").
• Look for story-continuation statements like "and then" or "soon" or "finally" or "the next thing that happened".
• Look for story-ending statements that summarize ("And so you see") or justify ("I learned a lot") or report a reaction ("He liked it") or ask for approval ("Can you believe it").

In general, if something is happening it's a story. You will find that after you've carefully located the first dozen or so stories you will develop an intuition and not have to look for them; you'll just see them.

Transcribing storytelling

Because storytelling is a performance, and because it usually contains a lot of "telling" emotion, it's useful to note some things when transcribing people telling stories that are not normally noted in transcribing other conversations. Some things you might want to highlight are as follows.

Words that stand out

Words said with particular emphasis or emotion, like "I couldn't believe that happened", can be important to understanding a story. This is especially useful when noting such emphases makes the emotional aspects of the story easier to understand. For example, if your transcript doesn't distinguish between these:

• we knew what to do
• we knew what to do
• we knew what to do
• we knew what to do

you might not know which of these stories is being told (and these are quite different stories). If your project involves reading stories (by yourself or others) you will find that working this in to the transcript is quite helpful. You can come up with a simple notation such as *asterisks* around emphasized words, to do this.

Ums and ahs

Most transcriptions remove ums and ahs. I've found that story transcriptions are better when they don't, because those can be important indicators of the emotional elements of storytelling. Most people will um and ah when they are nervous or unsure about something, or are trying to remember something, or are unsure of how something will be received. This isn't the type of transcribing where you are reporting a news bulletin; hesitations and confusions and poor grammar are part of what you want, not something to be thrown away.

Socially significant sounds and silences

Most transcripts ignore things like laughter, muttering, the sound of shuffling feet, and silence; but when somebody is telling a story those sorts of social cues can be very useful indications of what is going on in the storyteller's and audience's minds. Simple notations such as [laughter] and [long silence] can be helpful. One colleague developed a method of denoting laughter by putting one [HA] for each unit of laughter (as he defined it), so a long bout of laughter registered as [HAHAHAHA]. It's also useful to note who is laughing, or umming, or coughing, if you can tell that. Pauses are also important: a common practice is to use dashes for short pauses and ellipses for long pauses.

Sarcasm and other subtle cues

As we all know from email, a lot of the verbal and visual cues we give each other in person are lost when things are translated into text. Transcribers of storytelling should be aware of things that might not come across the same in text and make notations. For example, you might add notes like "said with a sarcastic tone" or "said in a Darth Vader voice" or "waving hand around" or "pointing out window" and so on.