Narrative inquiry without the participation

A colleague recently told me about a DARPA-sponsored workshop that was to take place in Washington, D.C. on the 28th of February (a date that has come and gone) to explore new directions for work on story for national defense. The description of the project sounded similar to the DARPA project I worked on from 2001 to 2003, which spawned a similar three-year project for Singapore. Together those projects helped form and/or refine some of the methods and software approaches I and many others in the field still use.

I thought about going to the workshop but decided against it. Partly it is an issue of taking time off from writing, but I also have mixed feelings about how the first DARPA project went. Mainly I was disappointed at how little useful output we produced for the amount of taxpayer money we spent. I had hoped to do more. This was not necessarily anyone's fault, just politics; but still, I'd like to find ways to spend my time that have a stronger positive impact if I can.

Still, listening to stories in order to "scan the horizon" and discover emerging threats and opportunities is as good an idea now as it was then, for governments and for everyone else too. I wish the new group the best in their laudable goals. To do my little bit to help, I thought I'd send some hopefully helpful advice to the program manager of the project. But then I thought, why not make it a blog post? That way the advice, for what it's worth, can help other people with similar goals too.

The workshop had three stated goals (this is from its description):

1. To survey narrative theories.  These empirically informed theories should tell us something about the nature of stories: what is a story?  What are its moving parts?  Is there a list of necessary and sufficient conditions it takes for a stimulus to be considered a story instead of something else?  Does the structure and function of stories vary considerably across cultural contexts or is there a universal theory of story?   
2. To better understand the role of narrative in security contexts.  What role do stories play in influencing political violence and to what extent?  What function do narratives serve in the process of political radicalization and how do they influence a person or group’s choice of means (such as violence) to achieve political ends?  How do stories influence bystanders’ response to conflict?  Is it possible to measure how attitudes salient to security issues are shaped by stories?   
3. To survey the state of the art in narrative analysis and decomposition tools. How can we take stories and make them quantitatively analyzable in a rigorous, transparent and repeatable fashion?  What analytic approaches or tools best establish a framework for the scientific study of the psychological and neurobiological impact of stories on people?  Are particular approaches or tools better than others for understanding how stories propagate in a system so as to influence behavior?

I'll try to address each point, considering what I would do if I wanted to achieve those goals myself.

Surveying narrative theories

My own survey of narrative theories resulted in my understanding of three dimensions of story: form, function and phenomenon. Pulling in an explanation from Working with Stories:

Story form is the internal structure of a story: things like setting, characters, plot and point. A good story uses effective narrative form to deliver a message well. 

Story function is its utility to our thinking and learning: things like meaning, understanding and connection. A good story helps us learn what we need to learn, find out what we need to know, or remember what we need to remember. 

Story phenomenon is the story of the story: things that describe context, like where and when and why a story was told, who heard it, how it can and will be retold, and so on. A good story lives on because it sustains the health of the community.

So the answers to the questions "what is a story" and "what are its moving parts" can take any of three forms, all of which are correct in context. The moving parts of story form are the tools of the fiction craft: arcs, beats, plot twists. The moving parts of story function are the bones of narrative knowlege management systems: practices, discoveries, lateral thinking paths. With story phenomenon it is not so much that stories have moving parts but that they are the moving parts of society: rumors, urban legends, fantasies.

Does the structure and function of stories vary considerably across cultural contexts or is there a universal theory of story? Yes. Both are true. Some elements of story are undoubtedly universal, but there are also differences in the way people from different backgrounds tell and listen to and trade and pass on stories. Oral storytelling traditions, with their memorable repetitions, still impact the way some cultures tell stories, but less so others. That is probably just one difference of many. Others might be the interplay of objective and subjective truths; the importance of place in storytelling; the expectations on an audience, to keep quiet or help build the story; expectations about self-expression versus contemplation of collective issues; what sorts of stories are taboo and expected.  I'm not aware of any exhaustive research on this topic, but my own experience in having read tens of thousands of personal stories told by people from different cultures (as well as thousands of folk tales) tells me there are differences worth exploring.

When looking for authoritative definitions in narrative topics, it is important to realize that dozens of fields of inquiry touch on narrative in some way. Many of these fields have different definitions, assumptions and goals, and many of them interact little with other fields. If you want to understand the landscape of human knowledge about narrative, it is worth learning a little about every single one of those fields. Here is a partial list of phrases worth googling:

• primarily story form
• narratology - Meike Bal's book Narratology is good
• professional fiction writing
• professional screenwriting - of course Robert McKee's Story is the authority here
• professional live storytelling
• primarily story function
• narrative in knowledge management
• scenario planning
• case-based reasoning
• knowledge representation / information retrieval
• primarily story phenomenon
• folklore study
• oral history
• narrative in cultural anthropology
• narrative community therapy - for example the Dulwich Centre
• narrative in community activism - for example the Theatre of the Oppressed 
• mostly story form and function, less so phenomenon
• literary theory
• narrative analysis
• mostly story function and phenomenon, less so story form
• narrative inquiry (participatory and otherwise)
• organizational storytelling / business narrative
• narrative medicine
• narrative therapy / counseling
• narrative psychology 
• narrative journalism 
• narrative in law - some universities have started programs in this area; see the book Minding the Law
• narrative policy analysis - see Policy Paradox and other books
• narrative in foreign policy - see Thinking in Time and other books

So that's where I'd start if I wanted a comprehensive answer to questions in the first set. I'd visit all of those topics, even if only for an hour or two, and see what surprising resources and connections appeared. (And if I missed some, which is likely, you might find that out too.)

Understanding the role of narrative in security contexts

This section is essentially about tying the research fields related to story phenomenon to psychology, sociology and political science. If I wanted to address this I'd convene people from all of these backgrounds and ask them to work together on a comprehensive literature review and exploration of fruitful ways forward. I don't know that there is anybody working in this particular junction, but I could be ill-informed on that point.

Making stories quantitatively analyzable

This set of questions is both the one I have the most direct experience with and the one I think my readers will most want to hear about. So I'll write much more about it, but I'll broaden the situation to make it more generally applicable.

Let's pretend that you have collected or discovered some stories, say hundreds or thousands, and you want to do more than simply read them. You want to find useful patterns in them that will help you make decisions and detect emerging trends. Participatory narrative inquiry is impossible because the original storytellers are inaccessible for one of any number of reasons. What options are available? Normally the projects I work on rely heavily on storyteller interpretation, for reasons I have written about elsewhere. But I have done some projects where I supplemented storyteller interpretations with analyses of my own, as well as some projects where only stories were available. The results are not as strong, but they can still be real and useful.

Before I start I should say that there is a large and complex literature on narrative methods of inquiry in the social sciences. There is much you can read there if you want to explore those topics. However I must admit that I tend to get in a huff every time I read a textbook on methods of narrative inquiry. The universal assumption that expert interpretation of stories told by others is tantamount to proof bothers me very much. Examples of stories interpreted by experts that entirely ignore the obvious fact that any other expert, as well as any other person, might give a different or even opposite intepretation, abound. I find the "I know what this means" mindset to be very similar to the "I am the world" mindset of some artificial intelligence practitioners, about which I have written previously.

It seems - to me - like some researchers who use and promote narrative analysis see expert interpretation as something that adds value, while I see it as something that removes value and should be used only as a tool of last resort. In my experience, applying expert interpretation to a story is like using a chain saw to harvest tomatoes. You will get something out of it, but it may not have much use in practical terms.

So, when I think about what options you have if you have stories but no interpretations, the options form into groups of increasing difficulty and decreasing utility.

Option group one: Asking proxies

If you have stories and you can't ask their tellers what they mean, you might be able to ask people close to the tellers what they mean. This could be people related to them in some way - their grandchildren maybe - or people similar to them in some way. For example, say you have a thousand anonymous stories told by customers of your product. Would it be better to consider the interpretations of (a) an outside expert, (b) your CEO, or (c) other customers? Of course the ideal is all three, because the more interpretations the better your view. But if you could collect only one set of interpretations I would suggest asking your other customers.

Sometimes you can't find anyone close to the original storytellers. Perhaps they are isolated or long dead. Perhaps nobody who is related to them or like them will talk to you - they are activists against your policies, for example. In this case you need to move on to the next group of options.

Option group two: Examining storytelling events

The second way you can work with stories without intepretations is to watch storytelling - the narrative event - to look for interpretations storytellers have embedded in their stories. People include meta-narrative content (essentially, a story about their story) in their stories all the time, and it's not that hard to find if you know what to look for. There are even some stock phrases people pull out when they want to communicate their story's importance or truth or authority or unimportance or triviality or entertainment quality. For example:

• I learned a lot!
• When I told Joe he was surprised about this...
• I never saw anything like this before!
• I shouldn't be telling you this but...
• Have you ever heard anything like this before?
• I will never forget that day.
• Listen, I happen to know that ....
• This is just my experience but ...
• Maybe you heard something different, but...
• This just beat all!
• I laughed and laughed!
• Can you believe this?

There are many other meta-narrations people use to signal their intent as to how they would like people to interpret their story. I don't think there is one fixed list of these, but most people are pretty good at picking up on them, since we hear them every day.

People also communicate information about why they are telling their story by the intensity of the words they use to describe their feelings. In one part of the story they might say "I didn't like that much" and in another part they might say "I was devastated." People turn the emotional intensity of their stories up and down as they speak in order to communicate which parts of the story they most want others to hear. I've always thought it would be great to have what I call a "ranked thesaurus," where words are ranked by their emotional intensity, value, complexity and other meta-information they provide. If you had such a ranking you would be able to chart the emotional rollercoaster of a story by the word choices made. The peaks and troughs of the ride would tell you things about the storyteller's intent.

If you have audio or video records of storytelling events, you can go much further into watching storytelling. You can watch prosody, or the rhythm and intonation of our speech, which is another way we add meta-information to our stories. If you have video you can watch body language. If there are others on the recordings you can watch audience reactions and the way the stories change as a result of the interchange.

Another way to watch storytelling is to watch the pattern of story back-and-forthing. You can do this in any situation where stories are told in response to other stories: in a chat session, in a room, over the phone. The way stories invoke other stories can provide information you can use to understand the intent of storytellers. There are many other nuances in the negotiations that take place as people trade stories - the field of conversational analysis is related where it touches on narrative.

Option group three: Analyzing texts

Studying exactly what was said in a story is still outside the realm of expert interpretation because anyone can agree on the words that were used. But it is weak in its ability to detect true intent, which puts it lower in the value scale.

Concordances are lists of non-trivial words in story texts - houses, dogs, weapons, iPods, babies - the things you see in those "wordle" pictures on the web. When a person mentions something in a story, it means that thing matters in some way, and that can mean something across many stories. For example, say you have three hundred stories that mention babies, two hundred that mention weapons, and fifty that mention both. Concordance methods can also include words placed close together - did they say "baby" within five words of "weapon" and so on. I don't think there is that much value in concordance all by itself, just because there are so many reasons people might mention the same word. It's a weak indicator of meaning. But if concordance can be combined with other information that is more emotionally meaningful, such as prosody or proxy evaluations, it can increase in value through juxtaposition. If stories that included the word "friendship" were more likely to have been seen by same-community proxies to have been told "to defend a position," that is a pattern you can examine.

Evaluation statements are phrases where people express a value they set on something. There are not that many ways to say whether something is good or bad, and you can search for and collate these statements. The simplest thing is to look for obvious value words like "good" and "best" and so on. That gives you the roughest approximation. Next you can look for other ways of expressing value, like "I liked that" or "that's fine" or "I was happy." I don't think you can automate this entirely, because finding the value statements doesn't easily show you what was being valued. But a system that highlights possible value statements and helps people enter data about the thing referred to are still a step up. I haven't done this, but I can imagine annotating a set of stories with metadata like "government - bad" and "family - good" and seeing what comes of it.

Statements of fact are another useful thing anyone can see and mark in stories.  Statements of fact are not the same as actual facts, but they can be telling nonetheless, especially when they disagree or are clearly wrong. Rumors are especially full of stated facts - everyone knows the government was behind that - so they may be especially worth mapping in projects where public opinion is being considered. These are not hard to find; you just look for places where people claim that something is true or untrue, like "nobody reads newspapers anymore" or "people annotate their stories with meta-narrative."

To be honest, though, I haven't spent much time on textual analysis of stories. I've done it here and there to try out ideas, but have never been very happy with the results. The output is full of false positives, dead ends and weak trends. If it has to stand alone I wouldn't trust it to tell me anything important.

Way back in IBM in 1999 I did a little research project where I put a variety of batches of text through one of the data mining tools IBM was selling at the time. Some of the texts were non-narrative listings of facts, some were conversational, some were newspaper articles, and some were short stories, movie scripts and folk tales. I tested tools for clustering, summmarization and feature extraction. All of these tools did very well on fact lists and news items, but very poorly on the stories. The problem was that the stories contained so many nuances and subtle variations of word use that the software was befuddled. It's hard to parse a story because it depends on a structural form that operates at a higher level than word use. The crux of a story may appear to a textual analysis system as a part where nothing important is happening.

Here's a bit from Bleak House, which I've just been reading:

"You may bring the letters," says my Lady, "if you choose."

"Your ladyship is not very encouraging, upon my word and honour," says Mr. Guppy, a little injured.

"You may bring the letters," she repeats in the same tone, "if you --please."

"It shall be done. I wish your ladyship good day."

No computer would understand that her ladyship has just taken a dramatic step in her last (seemingly unimportant) statement by embedding two meanings in the word "please" - one stilted and the other beseeching. She has crossed a threshold into a space in which she and Mr. Guppy are aware of the secret the letters contain, and she asks him to help her without forcing her to admit anything out loud. He takes the hint and moves on. A concordance that simply throws that "please" up onto a shelf with all the other pleases in the novel would be useless to understand this scene. Many stories are like this, and not just novels but the anecdotes we tell every day.

I did bring away two conclusions from trying to use automated textual analysis to look at stories. First, nearly all textual analysis systems that exist to date concentrate their efforts on nouns. In stories the nouns are not as important as the verbs, followed by the adverbs. If I was put in a box and forced to build an automated textual analysis system for stories, I'd go after those. (When I wasn't trying to break out of the box, that is.)

My second observation about textual analysis of stories is that I think to some extent people do use textual cues in reading stories, but we can't articulate what it is we are doing. If a computer were to watch a group of people interpreting stories, they might find out things we hadn't noticed we are doing. You could even do things with those devices they have now where you can track what words people are looking at and how long their eyes linger. An automated system trained in this way might find unanticipated ways to do what we do naturally.

But again, the closer your proxies can get to the storytellers the better you will fare in such an enterprise. An algorithm trained on the actions of people who share much context in common with the storyteller will derive different methods than an algorithm based on watching people from a different group. I've watched myself read stories, and I do read them differently if I know I share a lot in common with the storyteller than if I know I don't. Have you ever caught yourself reading three lines into an article, then going back up to the top to check the name of the writer for clues to their similarity to yourself? Probably few people can avoid taking such context-detecting actions, and they surely impact the way we read things.

Option group four: Asking story experts

This group of options crosses the line into expert interpretation, but it keeps the expertise in the realm of narrative and away from the subject matter of the stories themselves. When I have few answers from storytellers or when the answers present a garbled picture for some reason, I develop an emergent set of story subjects or gists. These are shorthands for story plots, like "I did my part but somebody else didn't" or "We help each other out" or "I faced a difficult challenge and succeeded."

The way I do this is based loosely on grounded theory and generally takes the form of three passes through the stories, thus.

1. First I write up one or more gists for each story, not caring much about reuse. If a particular story cries out for a gist I have already written, I will copy it and paste it in, but I don't force conformity. 
2. The second time through I read the stories again and compare the gists for each to my overall list. At this time I also whittle the gist-list down so that each gist is uniquely meaningful (none are redundant), each is populated sufficiently (none have few stories), and the total number is manageable (typically around twenty or so). 
3. Then I go back and read the stories a third time. This time I am not allowed to create any new gists or do any lumping or splitting unless I feel a story presents a serious challenge to the organization derived. When I finally feel like each story has been well described by its gists, I am finished.

Does this process of gist production insert my own bias? Yes of course it does. But it limits the bias to describing the events of the story. I try to keep things defensible, so that if I link a story to the gist "I did my part but somebody else didn't" I picture myself making a case for that explanation in front of an assembled body of storytellers who nay-say it. If I can't defend the placement I remove it. But most of us are masters of self-deception, so I only use this method when I feel it is necessary. It would be better to multiply it and have two people create two emergent sets of gists. This is definitely better but not always possible.

There is also structural analysis, which is the consideration of story form by itself. It looks at things like characters, settings, plots, conflicts and story arcs, and essentially treats stories like they are movies or novels. I have used some methods of structural analysis to supplement storyteller answers at times. Some questions I have asked myself are:

• Who is the protagonist of this story? Is it an individual, group or role?
• Who acts in conflict with that person or group or role? Who helps them?
• What scope of time and space is covered by the story? How many people does it involve - a few or many?
• Which official roles are important to the story? Police? Aid workers? (etc)
• Do certain events of interest occur in the plot of this story? Is there cooperation? Deception? Self-deception? Discovery?
• Which genre of fiction does this story best resemble?
• How much non-narrative content is included in the story?

These sorts of questions do involve some expert interpretation, but it is (like the gists) more defensible than statements about what the story means. One can make the case from the way the story is told that it is about a particular person, and people can agree on that. It would not be difficult to get a few people trained in narrative analysis to seek agreement on structural analysis of a body of stories. However, like textual analysis, I think it is a weak option best used in concert with another.

Option group five: Asking subject-matter experts

The very worst option for making sense of stories, in my experience, is to ask people who study the people who told the stories to interpret them. Why? Because they tend to have very strong opinions - based on their own experiences - about the storytellers, for or against. The most biased interpretations of stories I have seen have been made by people who consider themselves experts in the subject matter of told stories. If I had no choice but to work with subject matter experts in dealing with a batch of stories, I'd look for experts who disagree, or experts who come from different educational or geographic or cultural backgrounds, or experts who are expert for different reasons. I would try to increase the diversity of views in some way to counteract the shared assumptions held by experts in any field. There is no field of inquiry, academic or otherwise, that does not have its arguments and schools of thought; so why not use that to your advantage?

Another thing you can do when you expect the interpreters of stories to have strong unexamined (or even examined) assumptions about them and their storytellers is to confuse the assumptions by removing information about context. You can "scrub" stories so that they hide gender identities, localities, references to religion, and other contextual tie-ins. I once had some confidential stories I wanted to use to demonstrate the success of the narrative approach. How could I make my point without revealing the actual stories? I thought about the situation described in the stories and translated each story into a different subject matter domain, keeping the structure of the story intact. The real situation was highly sensitive and the fictional one was not, but the mixture of conflicts and goals was similar enough that the underlying patterns still made sense.  This took some work, but when I finished I had a data set that perfectly demonstrated the utility of the sensemaking system without revealing the original stories. If I had to use the interpretations of subject-matter experts on a set of stories I would consider doing a similar translation to a domain in which the assumptions of the experts would not be called into action. If you are an expert in, say, energy technology, you will respond in a different way to a set of stories translated into the domain of, say, biomechanics.

In addition to removing context, it also works to insert distracting context. On a project whose purpose was to help executives improve their leadership skills, Dave Snowden and I intermixed stories about contemporary leaders with ones about historical leaders - Helen Keller, Napoleon, Abraham Lincoln, and so on. In another project we injected stories of historical conflicts into a data set based on recent events. The historical stories were not disguised, but they were intermixed without notice so that when viewing contemporary stories, project participants would discover unexpected linkages. Here the goal was to stimulate people to break out of old ways of thinking, but the same technique could be used to help subject matter experts avoid interpreting stories based on knee-jerk reactions. For example, if you wanted to ask experts to interpret a collection of stories about political violence, you might inject some stories about political activism, state suppression of free speech, utopian or dystopian communities, and so on. The point would be to disrupt the tendency of experts to fall back on easy answers without reflection. These sorts of methods of keeping experts on their toes, along with as much diversity of thought as can be found among experts in a field, would help to buffer the impact of accepted-thought bias.

One last method of guarding against interpretation bias is to ask experts and value their opinions, but also ask non-experts - people on the street - and compare the answers. This does not mean that experts are wrong or that people on the street are wrong. It means that their differences can be instructive.

Summing up

So those are all ways in which anyone can make sense of a group of stories without the ability to ask their tellers what they mean. Some of them are similar or identical to what you can find described in textbooks on narrative inquiry and some are based only on my own experience helping people collect stories and make sense of them. Which of these techiques are best? Each has its benefits and detriments. My recommendation is, if possible, to mix multiple approaches so that you can bounce different sources of information off each other. In that way the different methods can help each other over their various difficulties like the deaf watching while the blind listen. Together they are bound to find something they can use.

From garment to fiber in story work (part two)

This is the second part in a two-part blog post reflecting on stories and story work through the lens of a journey through the world of textile crafts. You probably need to read the first part first to understand what follows.

DIY story world

What is the narrative equivalent of sewing your own clothes, weaving your own cloth, and growing and spinning your own yarn? Well, out of stories people generally build ... stories. We build larger stories that explain the way we are, how we got to be this way, what we expect to be soon, very soon, and what others should expect of us. People string together stories like beads on a string. It's "I was held back in school and my confidence was ruined" then on to "nobody supported me emotionally in college" and ... you can guess the rest. One of my favorite examples of a story built of stories was in the authoritative sci-fi show Red Dwarf, where Rimmer finds out that Ace, his alter ego in another universe, was also held back in school, but interpreted the setback as a challenge to succeed, and did; whereas Rimmer held it up as an excuse not to try, and didn't. Story after story from Rimmer's life was used to build a story of self-pity in Rimmer's life and enablement in Ace's life. Eventually, as I recall it, Ace inspires Rimmer to dash out into the future and become the himself he might have become ... or, maybe he chickened out, I can't remember.

Anyway, if people build stories out of stories in the same way that people build food and clothing and shelter out of plant and vegetable matter, what do they need to do that? If there were a DIY center for stories, what would it look like? People do this at many levels simultaneously: individual, family, community, organisation, society. I'm not going to think about all levels at the same time in an exhaustive mental survey. Instead I'll just ricochet around the spaces and see what happens. The four elements I can think of that people need to create their own constructed elements of life are: materials, tools, instructions and workspaces. I've been reflecting on each of these while thinking of my textile journey, similar journeys in the world of woodworking and cooking, and stories.

Stash, beautiful stash

What are the materials of story construction? It depends on whom you ask. If you define a story by form, stories are made of characters, settings, plot points, conflicts, arcs, and so on down the screenwriter's laundry list. If you define a story by function, stories are made of goals, plans, actions, expectations, surprises and discoveries. If you define a story by phenomenon, stories are made of rumor, gossip, belief, perception and truth. All of these are legitimate materials for story construction, and which you think matters most probably says more about you than it says about stories.

Where do story materials come from? All around us. Every breath is a story, every glance, very tic and twitch and smile. We don't need to go anywhere to find stories; we just need to pay attention to what is going on around us. When I think of people harvesting stories I always think of this little line from the Bible: "Mary treasured up all these things and pondered them in her heart." That's what we do when we are paying attention: we treasure up things that happen, good and bad, and we ponder them. That's all there is to it.

One thing that stands out as a constant element in all craft and DIY discussions is the importance of a stash. The uninitiated might believe people go out and buy materials for every separate project they undertake, but that is not the case. Everyone who does any amount of construction has a materials stash. A stash is a combination of poor planning, opportunism and hope. I used to have a large fabric stash but lost it or gave it away years ago, and it is interesting to see how it is reassembling itself as I begin to sew again. Sometimes I choose a fabric simply because I love it and want to use it for "something." Sometimes I choose a fabric for a project, but it turns out not to be right for that project but perfect for another. Some items join the stash because of an excellent close-out or "mill end" price and wait until their destiny arrives. A stash is really made up of stories. It is a repository of projects completed, in progress, interrupted, planned, envisaged and hoped-for. It is a record of the past and a substrate for the negotiation of meaning and identity in the present and future. Rather than supporting a simple relationship between material and purpose, the threads of cause and effect in the stash form a complex web of suggestions and cooperations. A maybe-project might join up with a maybe-material and solidify to form a definite creation.

Some stashes are carefully organised in elaborate color-coded boxes and bins, while some are so confused that new items are added simply because old items cannot be found. Systems for stash maintenance abound, but everyone knows it is not the number of bins you have but how much time you spend that determines the beauty of your stash. For example, my scrap wood is in a mess right now, but that's only because it's winter. One of the first signs of spring is the ecstatic trip to the lumber store and the renewal of hope in the form of a well-stocked stash. I recently spent an afternoon reorganizing my nails and screws into a wall-sized inventory system where I can see at a glance how many nails or screws of each size are available for a project. I often stand in front of the array and let ideas for new woodworking projects swim through my head.

In any stash, elements vary in size from full project portions (enough to make a sweater, when I get around to it) to adequate-but-small scraps (enough to make a pocket, if the occasion comes up) to the tinest of scraps only useful for rag rugs and other reconstructions. All of these items find their places in new projects. A pocket of silk may work its way onto a flannel jacket, and a line of fleece selvage makes a great tomato tie. Resourceful reuse is a point of pride for serious crafters, to the point that complaining about an overwheming stash is a barely-concealed play for dominance in any discussion of craft.

So, what is a story stash? It is just all the things that have ever happened to us, and all the things we have ever heard about happening to anyone else, and all the things we think or wish or dread could happen to us, since we started remembering things. At the level of the individual this is easy to think about. Some stories in our stash are taken out often and used to weave or sew garments of great value (being stories, they improve rather than degrade on copying). For example, some people say that the very first thing you can remember happening in your life says something about your image of yourself, because it is not really the first thing you remember; it is the start you have chosen for the story you tell to yourself about yourself.

Some people have wonderfully organized story stashes. You've met these people - they can tell you what they were doing in 1994, 1995, 1996, and so on. Others have jumbled story stashes where memories are organized not by year but by emotion or image or smell, and even the distinction between truth and fiction is not clearly noted on the annotating label. Some people spend large amounts of time organizing and reorganizing their story stashes, in company and in solitude, while others toss in new experiences and slam the door before everything comes tumbling out. Likewise, some people keep broad swaths of nearly-complete stories in their stash - a shirt needing only a button to complete, for example. I've noticed that older people tend to have a lot of nearly-complete garments in their story stashes, probably just from having gone back to the same project so many times. Other people never seem to keep much more than scraps in their story stashes, or even just fiber that needs a lot of coaxing to make its way up the staircase into something you can wear.

Do people use organization systems to manage their story stashes? Sure they do. This is why we have photo albums, hard drives, scrapbooks, heaps of old postcards, framed drawings, even all the little knicknacks that each contain a story about who gave us that when we went to the place where we saw that. This is why people buy houses, because they are tired of moving all their stories around from place to place. It's their stash. The fact that, as I said above, we have all this other non-story stuff mixed in with our story stash, like tissue paper in the material drawer or pine needles in the wood pile, inflates our stash and makes it harder to keep our stories at our fingertips.

All right, what about communities and organisations? That's where I think the metaphor starts to become more useful, because it is where I begin to see some gaps. These are some ways I've seen story stashes go wrong in communities and organisations, and some ways to avoid such problems.

The stop-and-go story stash is one where everyone gets all excited about collecting stories for a particular project or need, for a while, but afterward the project gets forgotten and the stash rots away. Six months later a whole new stash is collected, but the stashes are never brought together into a coherent inventory because there is no continuity. This is like people who get so excited about building a shed that they buy way too much wood, but then they leave the extra wood sitting out where it rots and can't be used to build the new and even more exciting shed they simply must build the next year. (This and all other craft situations are rhetorical and not based on actual events in the life of the writer.)

In contrast, people who manage a healthy story stash recognise that part of their commitment to the system is the responsibility to find suitable successors when they are ready to move on to other projects. Spare materials are not left to rot but are sheltered in expectation of reuse at a later date. In the world of narrative knowledge, such shelter may take the form of annotations that increase utility to those coming after: after action reviews, notes to administrators, stories of the projects and of the system itself. A self-perpetuating story stash tells its own story, and it continues to do so long after it is first created. We inherited some materials from my father-in-law's stash of materials for tinkering with bits of wood and metal, and every glance at it still tells us much about the man who once built and used it, so much so that we still find ourselves unable to disturb the stash to use any of its materials. It coheres, like any good story should.

The mish-mash story stash is one where lots of stories have been told, say on a forum or in interviews, but the stories are in such disarray that the only way to find stories to suit a particular project need is to painstakingly read each one. This is like the people who keep buying nails of a certain size over and over because they can't find any nails of that size, even though they are pretty sure they must have bought some at one point. Organisations end up with story stashes like this when they are willing to let people tell stories and save them, but don't want to commit to having anyone put in the time to manage the collection. They buy the bins, but nobody takes the time to put anything in them. Sometimes a mish-mash stash (say that six times fast) includes elements inherited from previous "legacy" stashes, and nobody knows quite what to do with those parts, so nobody does.

In contrast, a healthy story stash is maintained both with habitual, daily order (putting things back where they came from) and periodic reorganization (sorting out the nails) when things seem to be getting out of hand or when a new need arises. There is also some attention paid to the continued quality of the overall stash in meeting the needs of new projects. One develops a sense for how project-ready the stash is at any time. At the moment my sewing stash is a bit over-ready due to my eagerness to start up again, but my woodworking stash is in need of reinvigoration and I can plan nothing larger than a shelf. Stash awareness is not just of quantity but of quality at all positions along the staircase of manufacturing, from newly harvested to nearly built. So a good story stash is not only in order but also well balanced and available for projects starting with many levels of pre-built pieces. Such a story stash might have raw anecdotes at one level, stories that resulted from group exercises at another, and polished marketing materials at another, all related through meaningful links. In this way projects never fail for lack of material that suits the unique needs of those enthusiastic to build.

The just-for-show story stash is one where the stories are filtered upon entry so that the stash is not a true record of the narrative life of the organisation but rather a message-laden vehicle. This is like show stashes of people who don't actually intend to build anything but want to make sure visitors see they have fine fabrics or excellent wood they could use to build fine-quality crafts if they should so choose. Such a stash is anathema to true craftsmanship, since it is collected not to be used but to display the owner's ability to choose not to use it. These are the "tell us your success story" farces where employees or customers are encouraged to tell their stories while being given strong signals that only certain stories will be accepted, upon pain of removal (of story or person).

In contrast, a healthy story stash portrays the character of the organisation with all strengths and weaknesses intact. You can tell a lot about a person by looking at their stash. I remember pawing through my mother's stash long ago, and I can tell you that mine is like hers in the same ways I am like her, and it is unlike hers in the same ways I am unlike her. The story stash of a community or organisation should reflect the character of that body in the same way. When there are two stashes, one for show and one for use, tensions will arise. For this reason a healthy story stash must be frequently refreshed with new material that maintains a diversity of thought and viewpoint while supporting the goals, concerns and culture of the organisation. This might be a monthly influx of new stories told in response to questions based on current events or gaps to be filled in advance of upcoming projects. As a result the stash supports serendipitous connections that connect incoming materials with projects that spring to mind as patterns form. People can stand before the shelves and think of what might be possible, rather than simply what is permitted.

The bins-in-bins story stash is one where told stories are quickly harried into their correct places and never let out again. This is like the stash of a well-meaning but self-limiting crafter who thinks all materials should be perfectly in order - the one best order - at all times. The problem with such a stash is that serendipity dies: the satin never falls against the burlap. A certain amount of slack is necessary for an effective stash, and a healthy story stash manifests this need. Knowledge management systems are prone to this problem, because people want to organise but not reorganise. What many don't realize is that periodic reorganisation can contribute to a reinvigoration of knowledge. Many crafters gain a ritualistic pleasure from spending some quality time with their stash once a year. In the process new ideas emerge and old project ideas come back to visit and see if their time has come.

A practice popular among crafters is the stash swap, where people trade their unwanted disappointments for the treasures others don't want. You could imagine story stash swaps going on between organisational departments, at different levels, from different functions, and so on. Another phenomenon is the re-stash, where people who have lost their homes through natural disasters receive gifts of stash selections from the abundance of others. This would be similar to starting a new project group with "blasts from the past" in the form of stories collected during previous projects. Another thing crafters particularly enjoy is disseminating new and creative ways to organize materials in thought-provoking arrangements. My nail-and-screw wall is one example, but I've seen many more ideas on creative ways to use old CD boxes, filing cabinets, fishing tackle boxes, and a wide array of appropriated items. This works for stories too. Why not append collected stories to a financial report? Or constantly change the anonymous stories posted in the hallway leading to the lunch room? Or start every group meeting with a customer story? And so on. As you can see there are many creative ways to keep story stashes lively, most of which will provide energy and inspiration to those involved.

Tools of the trade

Now let us consider tools. In the craft or DIY store these take the form of simple and complicated machines: screwdrivers, hammers, saws, hooks, needles, sewing machines, looms. Screws and nails and thread don't qualify, because to be a tool something has to be taken back out after the project is complete. So a nail is only a tool if you take it out and use it again afterward, and sometimes you do that, say to punch a hole in something, so in that context it is a tool. Similarly in the world of stories something is a tool if you can remove it from one context and reuse it in another. Generally there are far fewer tools in the world of stories than there are in crafting or woodworking. You might think a report, say, on collected stories might be like a tool, because you can use it to influence policy or hammer home a message. But if you take that report very far out of context - pull the nail out of the beam - it will not operate in the same manner elsewhere. The only things that qualify, I think, as tools in the story world are methods for making sense of stories and software tools.

In any toolbox there is a range between tools that can be legitimately used in many contexts - the screwdriver, hammer, awl, and crowbar come to mind - and tools that only work effectively in narrow circumstances, like telephone wire strippers or chalk lines. The more involved the craftsperson the greater their proportion of specialised tools, but the lower their dependence on them. Meaning, if I know very little about a topic I am not likely to own or know how to use specialized tools. If I know just enough to be dangerous, I have probably bought some specialized tools but can only use them the way it says to on the box. If I am an expert, I can make a wire stripper into a screwdriver and a screwdriver into a wire stripper. It's like the buttonholer on a sewing machine: beginning sewers say it's daunting, intermediate sewers see it as life-saving, and expert sewers find it cute and occasionally expedient. Specialized tools distribute knowledge into the tool by embodying it. At the lowest level we can't link to the distributed knowledge there because we can't jump the barrier to use it. At the highest level the knowledge is in us, so we don't need the distribution anymore.

We see this in story tools as well. A novice at organisational story work can use only the simplest methods: collect some stories and tell people what they said. Later they learn to use some specialized methods in which they help people manipulate stories with a purpose in mind, but they can only do exactly as the published method describes. A master story facilitator can blend any available methods and materials into gossamer garments of insight and inspiration.

A center that supports story work, like a fabric or DIY store, must support people at all levels of tool use. You can tell how much people know about a craft not by which parts of the store they visit but by which parts they avoid. Rank novices go straight to the nearly-built and let's-pretend-you-built-it kits and avoid going near any tools with complicated names or functions. Those with more confidence avoid kits like the plague - heaven forbid they should be confused with novices - and go instead to the tools with the most exotic sounding descriptions. The experts avoid no aisles and gaze with calm equanimity on all available tools, confident in their ability to use everything somehow.

How can a story system support all levels of expertise in working with stories? It needs some nearly-built kits that require only a few decisions or actions to build a simple story from memories or events. People buy these all the time in the form of "memory books" for weddings, new babies, family reunions and other ritualised family events. The analogue in organisational terms is the yearly report, which follows a standard kit-like narrative form (we took your money and did great things with it, usually) that requires little creative effort. Project reports and other official stories are often completed in kit form.

Specialized tools in organisational narrative usually take the form of named, published methods such those in my own book. People pick up these tools and start using them as prescribed, simply at first and then with increasing sophistication as the tool becomes familiar to their hands. One thing a DIY store often has is a simple organisation of tools into grouped functions: these are for sanding, these for drilling, these for fastening, and so on. People need help to navigate the range of possibilities offered by an otherwise bewildering array of tools. Similarly, any system that presents story tools for the use of people in an organisation should help people navigate quickly and with little error to the solution they need. A matrix of needs and solutions, for example, would be helpful.

What about experts in the use of story tools? How can they be accommodated in the story system? What forms of support do they need? Do you know, I am less concerned with story experts being supported than with them being prevented from ruining the system's support for novices and intermediate users. There is a danger, when systems are built too much for experts, of intimidating novices away from the use of the tools they need. I'd either build a separate system for experts or let them use the system in a way that hides their activities from novices. Many DIY stores have separate "contractor" checkout lines and service centers that keep them away from the vulnerable novices in this way. My advice is to let story experts provide advice and help when it is needed and asked for, if they can behave themselves, but don't let them take over and keep everyone else locked in passive dependence.

Another possibly useful aspect of physical tools is that every tool tells stories. When I look at my sewing machine it tells me about all the things I have used it to do. The same is true for my jigsaw and other woodworking tools. Tools become repositories of the stories of their use, some hidden from obvious view. I remember a time last summer when my son came up to me with a tool and asked what it did. I said, "Hand it to me and we'll find out." I didn't remember what the tool did, but once I had it in my hand, the tool and my hand told me the story of its use by the way they moved together; then I knew. So, what would organisational story tools look like if they retained their stories of use? Perhaps they would accrete stories about times people had used the tool. Why couldn't they? A description of how to carry out a story method could easily be annotated with such stories; and that could improve the tool's effectiveness in the organisation.

Tell me how

The next component of a DIY story store is instructions. These are the equivalent of the books, patterns and classes provided for beginning crafters. Here I must confess to being an instruction bigot. I read manuals from cover to cover. I scoff at duffers. I buy books written for professional contractors because I want to know how to do everything the right way and the whole way, even if in actual reality I cut corners and do everything wrong, for illustrative purposes of course. It is a character flaw, I know.

A few weeks ago I spent a lovely me-time afternoon at the fabric store paging through hundreds of patterns I could use to build an entire wardrobe of stunning outfits. In the end I put them all back and bought some patterns for children's clothing. This was not because I didn't feel capable of sewing my own clothes, noooo. It was because I felt I should not descend to such a novitiate level. I should build my own patterns from clothes I already like. This was a temporary and quite stupid rise of pride, because the moment I got home I wished for a nice set of printed instructions to follow. It also clearly marks me as a non-expert intermediate sewing snob, because I care whether I use the crutch, while an expert would use the pattern if it suited, with no threat to identity. I do know how to make patterns from existing clothes, but I last did it decades ago and should have not allowed myself to puff up in such a way. But I couldn't help it; I became incensed by the difficulty ratings in the pattern catalogs. Apparently nobody knows how to sew anymore. About eighty percent of the patterns I saw were in the "easy" or "very easy" category, with only about twenty percent rising to the level of "average" or "advanced." It reminded me of Garrison Keillor's joke of the town where all the children are above average. (I also smugly noted that the piratical coat we had built was in the "average" category, marking my first return to sewing as far above average in difficulty. Another sign of snobbery: treading on the heads of those beneath.)

I also noticed another thing that at the time seemed all of a piece with the disgraceful decline in skill, but now seems less blameful. In one special section of the catalogs, all of them, were historical costumes for use in plays and societies in which you have to wear special clothes in order to quaff mead and lance orcs. Nearly all of those patterns were in the average or advanced categories. I do not doubt for a second that the great majority of people who sewed such outfits in the past were far superior to we modern idiots in these things. As I have lamented elsewhere, we do not know what we once knew. However, things are as they are, and the pattern companies are only working with the material of reality. Those who build systems to support the use of stories must live with the same decline in widespread skills. We must go to where the people are.

The word in software interface design circles is that tooltips, those little pop-up messages that tell you what that thing you are pointing at does, are life-savers. I agree and rely on them a lot, both in building and in using software. I think it has become a sort of reflex to hold our mice over things we don't recognise and wait for them to call out what they do. I remember once when I had been working far too hard, I was out driving the car and actually pointed my finger at a road sign expecting it to pop up a message. (I turned off the computer for a few days. I know a message from myself when I see one.) This is the new reality: people don't want to sit down with a two hundred page manual and scale the mountain of understanding. They want steps cut into the mountain with little catchy signs next to each one. Try this step! How about this one! Here's a fun one! It makes sense to support the use of story tools this way too. I'm rewriting the story-method parts of my book right now (or should be except that I'm writing this blog post which seems to go on and on), and that makes me think that I should have a "quick start" and "explore more" section for each method. Instruction bigots cannot survive in tidbit world. We must adapt.

I am nearly done here; just a few more things to tack on to the end of this building project. The other day I was learning how to card wool off the internet. (That sort of statement still sounds funny to me, how about you?) I found two sources of information. First I found several hobby carders like myself, even some pretty good ones, describing at great length why you should move this thing past that thing in just this way, and how if you do this wrong thing you will end up with this mess, and so on. I watched the videos several times and still could not put their explanations into my hands. I could never seem to do what they said I should do. Then I fumbled onto two videos of expert carders, one in Morocco and one in Mexico. These two women gave me the exact opposite lesson. They looked at the camera in a bemused way, as if someone were watching them breathe, and they didn't explain anything. They just carded, over and over, the way they obviously learned from their grandmothers. I watched them do this about twenty or thirty times while holding the hand carders and clumsily moving them around. Then, all of a sudden, I got it. Now I can do it, though I still can't say exactly how it is I'm doing it. Somehow that spark of understanding passed from them to me and now I have it. If I take care of it, I think it will grow.

I've been thinking since this carding epiphany that story understanding is a lot like that spark. I wonder if this is why apprenticeship is so useful in fields where articulation is difficult, like in story work. I try to explain to people how to work with stories, but I am like the hobbyists explaining how to move the hand carding tools around. How do you explain something you can't explain? People need to just get out there and listen to stories, and then they will suddenly get it. But I can't stand in front of people carding, and besides, I'm just an intermediate-level story carder myself. I wasn't born with it like those people were; you can see it in their faces. Talk to a real live griot if you want to see the real thing. I think what I try to do is help people gain enough confidence that they can hold the tools in their hands, watch an expert at work, and suddenly get it, even if they are not entirely sure what they received. One problem is that there are so very few real story experts today. Once in a while you meet a person who has a great facility with stories, and they are a joy to watch. But in twelve years of doing this work I have probably met only a few such people. They have not all been acknowledged experts at story work, either: some people just have that spark and think in stories, and you can see it in the way they live their lives.

One thing I would be excited to support is some equivalent of whatever efforts brought those videos of the Moroccan and Mexican carders to a Youtube video. Where are the story carding experts today? Can we see them at work? Can they show us what they do, so we can watch it over and over until we suddenly get it? Where would I look for such a person? I'd look in intact communities. It would almost have to be an old person. It might be a materially rich or poor person, but it would definitely be a person rich in community context. It would be someone who, when you go to a place, everyone asks if you have met them yet because you should if you want to know the place. When people get to that position in the community they probably know how to work with stories, and not just telling them but listening to them and building things out of them. You know, treasuring them up and pondering them. I'd like to watch those people work.

Space to work

My final category of things people need to build their own stories is workspaces. In crafts and DIY these vary from entire buildings to corners of cluttered cabinets. Like tools and stashes, workspaces tell stories about their owners. The workspace of organisational story work is the people themselves, and more precisely it is the people in conversation with themselves. The memory of the people in the organisation, and all the things that aid and transmit that memory, are like its stash. The equivalent of getting things out of the stash and assembling them into something bigger requires people to interact. So I'd say conversation is the story workspace. One reason many organisations and communities today, as opposed to those in the past, are less active in habitual story construction is because conversation requires time spent without a purpose that is clear in advance. Asking people to generate a collective effort without unstructured time to converse is like asking someone to sew a garment or build a cabinet without giving them anywhere to lay out the pieces. They just don't have enough space to work in.

I've been looking around on the web at workspaces people set up for crafting to see what they can say about story workspaces. To begin with, everyone cites the need to economise their use of space. One thing I've noticed about my own craft workspaces is that they expand and contract constantly. Sometimes I need to lay out a great quantity of material or wood, but I don't have the room to maintain that level of dedicated space all the time. In a similar way, organisations are typically limited as to the time they can give to apparently purposeless conversation. When the need arises people do expand their conversational space, whether the expansion is sanctioned or not. People can't help but come together to make sense of things that are astir in the community or organisation, like possible mergers or layoffs. It is a mistake to curtail such workspace expansions, because they are projects that need doing.

Second, craft workspaces are private places. One commenter on a forum said something like "I need to be able to close the door on a project so you can't see its clutter from the living room." What they really meant, probably, was that they aren't ready to show the in-progress project to the world and they want to keep things put away until the time is right. Certainly I can understand that. Walking into the middle of a story workshop and demanding to see results would be similar to barging into a project where I might be building a shed and might be having an accident. I'm not ready to display either outcome yet. For that reason story workspaces must have means of temporary protection for ongoing work, even if it is ongoing for months. Tentative explorations on sensitive subjects demand closed doors, even if they are opened for show once in a while.

A third thing I see people building into their craft workspaces is some way to control or put away clutter during times of intense concentration. This is also important in story work. We do this by asking people to tell stories about a mutually agreeable topic of concern and put the clutter of other stories away for a time. A general story exchange should be serendipitously open, but a session of intense concentration should close up the bobbin boxes and clear the space for action.

The last thing I often see in craft workspaces is the proud display of crafts built in past projects. People use these to present their workspaces to the visiting world, but perhaps more importantly, they display their works to inspire and motivate themselves. Story workspaces should have these displays as well. If people are telling stories in a space, for example, would it not be motivating to see thumbnails leading to previously built sensemaking outputs such as histories, landscapes or constructed characters? These can serve as ritual touchstones that remind people of their purpose in working together and their confidence that they can achieve the goals they set.

So there you go, we have reached the end of our meandering journey through the textile and do-it-yourself world with an extended metaphor for company. I hope it has been helpful to some. It has been a lot of work for one metaphor, but don't worry - when I make a metaphor do a lot of work like that, I always pay it extra. (That's from Alice in Wonderland, if you forgot. Which you shouldn't. Go and read it again!)

From garment to fiber in story work (part one)

Here as usual is a perambulatory rumination on matters obliquely yet genuinely connected with organisational and community narrative. As always I beg your patience in seeing how it all fits together.

An ever deeper journey

I have been studying historical architecture for the past few months together with my seven-year-old son, and as part of this we have enjoyed David Macaulay's excellent books on architectural landmarks. A favorite is Mill, about the design and evolution of textile mills in 19th century New England. Reading Mill led to a discussion of where clothes come from, and how people grow and card and spin and weave and sew, and how the industrial revolution started mainly in the textile industry. This started us on a journey through the world of textiles that has given me occasion to reflect on many elements of contemporary life, including narrative elements, hence this post.

I am not a stranger to sewing. I grew up watching my mother sew many of our clothes, and as a teenager and young adult I tried to do the same. But I was impatient and sloppy and wasted money on botched jobs. After we read Mill, I dragged out my old sewing machine, found my bobbins and instructions, and started to think about sewing again. Off we went to the fabric store in search of an easy pattern, but instead found a gorgeous pirate-style long coat that simply demanded to be created. So we created it with surprising ease. It turns out parenting comes with an automatic patience upgrade, so I am a more capable seamstress than I once was. And my son helped run the sewing machine, make measurements, pin pattern pieces, cut fabric, thread needles, choose stitches, wind bobbins and so on. Together we chose fabrics for the body, interface and lining; selected buttons and trim; and amended the pattern to improve on the trim design and add important details like real pockets and a broad collar. It was a true collaboration.

The new coat is simply beautiful, all cuff and golden flourish. My son immediately began wearing it everywhere, and we have incorporated it into many of our pretend games. We have both been surprised by the outcome, and have since collaborated on a soft sweater he loves almost as much. (Next he wants a dress-up tie.) On his part, I'm not sure he believed me when I said we could make clothing. What surprises me is not that we could make something. What surprises me is what we made. It is most definitely not a coat. It is a negotiated construct, a composite story about us and our world, and I find it not that different from the constructs I have seen people build out of told stories.

Around the same time we were building our coat, while wandering the aisles of the fabric store I came across one of those cheap plastic looms, the kind you use to make loosely woven potholders no sane person would actually use to hold a scalding pot. My learning-experience parenting muscle went into spasm, and I grabbed the loom and threw it into the cart. When we got home, the child showed no interest in the loom, but to my surprise, I did. I found myself getting it out over and over again, and I used up all the loops that came with it and went through an ancillary set as well. There was something profoundly calming in the simple act of picking up one thing and putting it over and under another thing. A lot of my middle-aged mom friends crochet or knit, but I can't seem to bear it. I suspect it has to do with having spent decades using my hands to poke at computers in small repetitive ways. But this little loom seemed to fit in somewhere, in a place where there was an inarticulate gap.

This dovetailed with the next logical step after our sewing project: a discussion about where fabric comes from. We started to read about the various kinds of looms and their history and uses. I started wondering whether I could buy or build a larger non-potholder loom to play with in the evenings. If it had been summer I would have built my own loom, which looks easy enough; but it won't be warm enough to do woodwork outside for a few more months. So after much fretful comparison of options and costs, we ordered a laptop "rigid heddle" loom. Compared to real room-sized looms this is a toy, but it is more serious than the tiny looms that produce scraps of fabric. Some real weavers swear it can be used to produce excellent fabric despite its small size, and some even keep several around for small projects. My ideas of making fabric were like my son's about sewing: I wasn't sure it was possible but I wanted to find out.

We got our loom about two weeks ago and have now produced about twenty square feet of miraculous fabric that slowly improves in appearance and stability as we learn. Our first cloth became a pillow cover for a huggable pillow that sits in our living room, and our second became a lovely red carpet suitable for rolling out on occasions of royal pomp (when you are seven such occasions arise at least daily). On the loom now is a soft baby blanket.

You can predict what I will say next, I think. We ordered and received some simple hand carders, a drop spindle and a sampler of fibrous materials: wool, alpaca, camel hair, silk, flax. We have been slowly learning how to card and spin (guess why they call it a drop spindle?), and our next woven masterpiece will include some hand-spun fiber.

We will not be raising sheep, but we are eyeing the dogs and plan to collect and spin some of their soft fur as soon as weather permits. Our husky-mix practically sheds a cat in the spring. Flax apparently grows well in my area and will be in the garden next year. And I found out recently that stinging nettle, a scourge near our pond, can be made not only into a liver-tonic tea but also into yarn for cloth. The journey continues.

Going down the up staircase

Why are you writing this post? Says the usefully nay-saying reader. Is it about crafts? Not really. What I want to write about is what this journey through the textile world has taught me about stories, which is much more than I expected (especially as I expected no such connection). Hopefully those who like to think about stories and their role in families, communities, organisations and societies will find these analogies interesting and useful. [Edit: If thinking about the types of do-it-yourself construction I explore here - mainly textile, woodworking and cooking - does not resonate with you, feel free to translate to whatever it is you do like to make for yourself: music, spoons, videos, blog posts, coffee, paintings, an exercise program, field guides, little gnome figurines, whatever.]

So. What about weaving then? Much more than with sewing, weaving has been a revelation to me. More precisely, my reaction to weaving has been a revelation to me. I keep finding myself lying my cheek on the cloth I have just woven, rubbing it with my hands, even hugging it in my arms. What is it about sewing and weaving that draws me in so strongly?

Confused by this reaction, I began examining it. My first thought was of the age-old interplay between comfort and freedom. As you move down the staircase of manufacturing from clothing to cloth to yarn to fibre, you give up the comfort of choosing a well-constructed piece of clothing from a rack and gain the freedom of building clothing that suits your needs perfectly.

When you sew you can choose fabrics, colors, patterns, and trims; and when you have enough sewing skill you can amend patterns or do without them. When you weave you can create fabrics from yarns, colors, patterns and practices; and when you have enough weaving skill you can evolve new patterns and practices. When you spin you can create yarns from fibers, mixes and dyes; and when you have enough spinning skill you can blend fibers and create yarns with new properties. When you grow or harvest fibers you can nurture plants or animals so that they create fibers of particular types; and when you have enough growing skill you can open the black box of nature and begin manipulating its contents, breeding and arranging the elements of life itself. All of this takes time and effort, thus some discomfort in the form of real and opportunity costs, while it increases your freedom to range and build.

What is the equivalent staircase of manufacturing in narrative? If buying a t-shirt in a store is the equivalent of watching a movie or reading a novel, what are sewing and weaving and spinning and growing and breeding? The sorts of narrative sensemaking activities I help people do in workshops seem like sewing. They start with premade stories and rearrange them to create garments with unique purpose and fit. But the pieces feel stitched together, not woven.

Weaving stories is an involved activity that requires time and attention. When I sit with hundreds of stories for dozens of hours, I feel that I do weave rather than sew, and that what I create is more like cloth - for others to stitch together - than a garment. I don't believe I have any special ability to do this; in fact I think any individual or group could do the same. Experience matters, but the more critical elements are time and patient attention, just as in physical weaving. When you weave you must sit with and watch over every one of the thousands of strands that make up the cloth, just as if they were children under your charge. Errant strands can be brought into alignment, but yarn speaks and a good weaver knows how to listen to what the cloth wants to be and negotiate an outcome that suits everyone. Sitting with stories is no different. A two-hour or even a full-day workshop is not likely to satisfy those requirements, though I have seen some longer repeated sessions come close to crossing the line into weaving cloth.

Spinning raw stories and growing story fibers ... are things few people have or take the time to do today. To get to that depth of involvement I think you need to consider griots and other story caretakers who learn their craft through years of apprenticeship and hone it over several decades. Some might say the great storytellers of novels and movies spin stories, but I don't think most penetrate to that level. Few new movies and books spin their own cloth. Many stitch together old stories; some weave old yarns; only a rare few still spin.

What about people telling everyday stories in their everyday lives? Don't we still do that? Of course we do. Everyone still grows and spins and weaves and sews their own stories. But our story clothing has changed in the same way our real clothing has changed. One of the most depressing facts of industrialization is that it now costs more to buy the raw ingredients necessary to complete almost any do-it-yourself (DIY) project - fabric, yarn, fibre, wood, nails, sheet metal, wires, electronics - than it does to buy the mass-produced product. I am only able to weave my own cloth and sew my own clothes because I have enough money (or believe I do, which may or may not be the case) to "play peasant" with materials. (Some people do manage to sew or weave economically, but they spend a lot of time bargain hunting, so it's only cost-effective if you count their time as having little value.)

Things are similar in the world of stories. Television shows are the ten dollar t-shirts of narrative and movies are the thirty dollar "nice shirts" at department stores. The  expensive stories are those you build yourself from the raw material of time to talk to the people you know - a luxury few of us have in abundance. As a result only the rich have strong, beautiful personal story garments. The rest of us walk around clad in story tatters. I read somewhere that before the factories came, nearly every house and hut had a spindle or wheel and loom sitting beside the fireplace. Did every house have a story loom too? What sits there now? You know what it is. It's the business end of a story factory.

Ways through and walls between

One of my favorite bits of literature on narrative is Stephen Crites' chapter on stories and life, in which he says that people live in sacred stories and with mundane stories. Over the past week I keep walking around and just looking at my house as though I have never seen it before. In one sense, I haven't ever seen it before. I can now see that I live with many of the objects in my house, but in few of them.

What exactly is missing in our world of store-boughten things? Marx told us what, and so did Lefebre, Boudrillard, de Bord, Ruskin, Morris and many many others. I've been reading more of that literature lately, trying to find explanations there for my feelings. People say that industrialization destroys quality, abuses workers, alienates people from products and limits the expression of self. This is all true, but what I have been feeling lately has little to do with any of those things. What I see is that the things my son and I have created, unlike anything else we own, are conduits of contextual connection. They are strings we have woven to create a life together out of one cloth, both figuratively and literally. We chose the yarns and colors, we calculated the ratios and patterns, we took turns pulling the warp yarn through the heddle and passing the shuttle back and forth. Some of the lovely mistakes in our cloths are mine and some are his, intermingled. It is not our cloth: it is our story. In contrast, some - but not all - of the built objects I have bought and brought together around me seem less like conduits and more like walls. They don't connect us but stand between us.

Thinking about everyday objects in terms of context and connection brings a stronger analogy with stories than thinking about comfort and freedom. The things I see around me that act as conduits all have, or represent, or are, stories. The last cloth I can remember feeling this attached to is in a tiny hand-woven poncho my grandfather bought for me on a trip somewhere out West, probably when I was about seven myself. At that time, the idea that my one living grandparent knew I existed filled me with wonder, and I displayed the poncho in my room like a museum piece. That poncho still brings back strong memories of my grandfather and stands out from all the junk in my house like a gem in a coal mine.

Here is the question I keep asking myself lately. What proportion of the total number of objects in my house is made up of conduits? Is it twenty percent? Thirty? What proportion would have been conduits two hundred years ago? Seventy percent? Eighty? What would it be like if everything you saw was a story about your web of family and community? What would that be like? It is hard to imagine such a world, but that was the world people lived in for almost all of history. I keep walking through rooms trying to imagine every item of clothing, every piece of furniture, every dish and spoon, every decoration, every window and door and floorboard, telling stories. In comparison I feel like a visitor in my own home.

Am I saying bought objects cannot represent conduits of contextual connection? No, not at all. Within an arm's reach you and I can surely lay our hands on items we bought and subsequently endowed with rich meaning. However, I lay you odds ten to one that any such objects around you were bought years ago, not recently. It takes longer to build a conduit out of something you encountered only late in the story of its existence. If a cloth was already woven when you got it, you can't weave it again; you can only sew it in at the edges. But this does not mean I believe everyone should rush "back to nature" and consume nothing but the products of our own labor. I don't think people are that devoid of ingenuity. We can and do build with what we are given, even if it is already built when we get it. And I agree with those who say we create bricolages of bought products that express our individuality and build connections. My feeling is not that we are wrong, but that we are poor. We get by with much less than we need, and that's sad.

Our contemporary state of conduit poverty is not my point either, really. What bothers me about the low proportion of story-conducting items around us is that it appears to be higher than it really is. Bought items, mostly by design, appear to contain more stories than they actually do, and that is what I think is dangerous. When we mistake walls for conduits we mistake disease for health. My husband pointed out, when I told him this argument, that it bears an interesting resemblance to similar points made in the books The Pleasure Trap, Supernormal Stimulus and Eat for Life. The argument in all of these books goes like this: we crave something; we look for that thing in the wrong place; we consume something we think will suit our needs; our craving is partially satisfied, but only partially; we know of nowhere else to look, so we consume more of that thing; it still only partially satisfies our craving; and round and round we go, getting fatter and fatter in one way while we starve in another.

There is one method of building conduits around which I have decidedly mixed feelings. It is the phenomenon of mass customization. In my textile travels I was excited to find the Spoonflower web site, which sells a service using which you can upload your own visual design and receive cotton cloth with that design printed onto it. This is only one example of many such sites such as ponoko.com in the "personal factory" movement that help people inject context into built objects, in effect drilling conduits through walls. I can see how this approach can help people enliven and enstory their surroundings. I already have plans to design some drawings with my son and use them to build clothes that embody our stories. But I don't feel mass customization is enough all by itself.

If we are to come to a new age where we live in our stories again, we should use every means to get there, but mass customization cannot be the only means. We must maintain the ability to venture down the staircase and make things ourselves. I get nervous when there is a black box we cannot open whose products we must take on faith. I want to know I have the option to get back to the source, even if I do not use it. If I want to grow my own flax and make a shirt of it, I want to know I can do that, even if I don't. Show me a device I have some hope of building given time and attention, and I'll use it to inject meaning after the fact. But don't use it to bar my way.

Clothed in meaning

I was thinking about all this the other day as I put away some clothes, and the clothes started to sort themselves out by the stories they told.

Some of my clothes tell no stories at all. These are clothes I bought for abject utility, usually because I didn't have time for laundry and wanted to stretch out the supply a little further. They are cheaply made and untrusted. They might be someone else's clothes for all I know or care. They are like the almost-stories you find in instruction manuals: if you push this button, this panel will pop out. Generic. Walls.

In the mid-range are clothes I bought because they seemed to match my personality at the time - I thought I saw myself in them - but I was mistaken and they did not suit. Those clothes are like situation comedies on television: the feeling of resonance with your life lasts about one minute longer than the laugh track. I used to get clothing catalogs full of clothes (due to the divine grace of CatalogChoice.org I am no longer burdened by such things), and I sometimes watched myself looking through them. You may have noticed this as well. I never looked at the clothes. I looked at the people. If a woman looked like she was like me, not in physical appearance but in attitude, beliefs, fears maybe, like what I was like inside, I wanted to buy what she had on. Of course, when I actually did buy what she had on, I was almost always disappointed. I had gone looking for something where it could not be found, and I did not find it. This is similar to the way in which people watch television shows for the escapist friendship fantasies they contain while eroding their time to pursue the real thing. These clothes can seem like conduits for a brief moment, but they are actually walls.

Next there are the folk-tale clothes, ones I bought because I wished I could wear them or felt I should wear them - frilly things, business-like things, trendy things - but found I remained myself even with them on. They did not have the power to change who I am inside. The great majority of these clothes mean nothing to me; they could disappear and I would feel nothing but relief. Once in a great while a folk-tale item does cross the line into the sacred, but this is only because it was initially misclassified as fictional.

Three types of clothes tell sacred stories. The first is the accidental discovery of myself, when I have wandered through a store or poked through a web site and found myself there. As I said, this can seem to happen before the purchase, but it can only be proven years afterward. I can count these items of clothing on my ten fingers, but I wear them until they fall off in tatters. They take on formative qualities, names, rituals. My holey pooh shirt is only worn on International Days of Self-Pity. I have recently acquired a Firefly t-shirt which is only to be worn on Days Of Great And Courageous Challenge, but at this point it is still in the folk-tale stage and may or may not prove sacred in years to come. Other items are too ridiculous to divulge in public, but suffice it to say that even a pair of socks can have magical powers in times of need. When I have the good fortune to find this sort of clothing for purchase, it is like the movie or novel I feel has been written exclusively for me, and about which I feel intensely embarassed that anyone else has seen it. I remember coming out of a few movies with friends and finding myself unable to speak while they carried on the usual discussion about plot holes, because the story was accidentally my story. These finds are precious because they are so rare. I think half of the reason people buy clothes is to find these gems, and that's probably half the reason people go to movies too.

The second-most powerful type of sacred clothing is clothing somebody chose for me. I have shirts and sweaters my parents or siblings or husband gave me that I would never pick out for myself, that don't suit my style at all. But they do suit me, because what I am more than anything else is a person who has parents and siblings and a husband. The fact that I would never wear a sweater with little pom-poms on it is beside the point. Even things I received with initial embarassment as being too kitschy or uncool to grace my house or self have become badges of belonging as time goes by. These clothes are large open conduits, and I sometimes wear them ritually in order to have a loved one near me in times of trial or stress.

Clothing actually made for me by people who love me is of the strongest possible meaning. I have precious few of such items, which is no slight to those who love me. I once had more but lost many things due to the blindnesses of youth. In some ways my late discovery of the contextual conduits was gently nurtured by my siblings, three of whom have consistently given home-made gifts that resonate thoughout my house like an endless family reunion.

I can now add a fourth category of sacred clothing, one I had once known but had forgotten: clothing I have made sacred by building it myself or in collaboration with a loved one, human or otherwise. I have only begun to explore what the conduits made of this clothing might be like. My initial reactions are strong, but after the novelty wears off I suspect they will not surpass the made-for-me group, because no matter the connection a gift is a gift.

So there I was having these thoughts while trying once more to jam my abundant, comfortable, anonymous clothing into the dresser I had used since childhood and which my grandparents had used before me. It is a dresser that was built in the days when clothing meant something, so of course it is too small for what I own.

I began to have a radical thought. What if I owned no non-meaningful clothing? What if every item I owned was sacred, by accident, gift or creation? What would that be like?

I find myself excited by this idea. I think I could easily give away most of the clothing I own and be happier for it. I would say the proportion of my clothes that fit into the sacred category is no more than twenty percent. Why do I have all these other things? Why do I keep them? Why did I buy them? What would happen if I stopped buying meaningless clothes? I would have to wash clothes more often, but what of that? Washing clothes would itself become an act of meaning, a visit to friends instead of a mindless drudge. I nearly had a heart attack when I had to cut into my first woven fabric to fashion it into a pillow cover, and I wonder if the rise of mechanical washers went hand-in-hand with the rise of mass-produced clothing because people were willing to let meaningless clothes be ruined by the heavy hands of thoughtless machines. Certainly it is far more through washing than wearing that our clothes fall apart over time (try googling "washing machine ruining clothes" and you'll see what I mean). We take care of the things we love.

This brings to mind the book Material World. This amazing book shows something like twenty families from all over the world sitting in front of their houses with all of their belongings spread out around them. The juxtaposition I always remember is between a family in Texas with enough material goods to support a village and a family in Nepal with something like ten bowls, five hoes and a bedsheet. I'm exaggerating but you get the point. The first several times I looked over the images in this book I focused on the things and what they said about economic disparity. But now I find myself getting out the book again and looking for contextual conduits. Which objects link the people to other people, and which do not? It is probably impossible to tell, because who am I to know your context; but I do notice that the things people have in front of or close to them seem more meaningful to them than the things behind them. The Texas family holds their Bible proudly in front of them while the Nepalese display their metal bowls, which may be religious in nature, almost as mediating representations of themselves. As I look at these pictures I am finding I envy these people in proportion to how many possibly conduit-forming objects I see around them. My favorite photograph now is of a Guatemalen family proudly displaying their spinning wheel, two large looms, and entire family wardrobe of hand dyed, spun, woven wool. What wealth, what finery.

What hypocrisy, you say. Yes, it's all fun and games when it's not your only option. I agree. Throw me into a mud hut and force me to grow my own things and I would surely pine for smooth sheets and a refrigerator. And it is surely ridiculous for a person who lives in a house with a floor, even a cracked linoleum one, to say anything about envying people who live in precarious, unsanitary conditions. But maybe we don't have to give up contextual wealth to gain financial wealth. That seems to be the bargain we are living under, but maybe our next utopia should be one where physical and social needs are met together. I am reminded of Ursula K. LeGuin's utopian novel Always Coming Home, which puts forth a vision of technology used but controlled within a moral framework that asks the difficult questions we put aside. I like the idea of society molding its use of technology to our needs rather than molding our needs to the available technology.

After this revelation at the dresser I found myself jumping over the wall of analogy into the land of stories. What would happen if I owned no non-meaningful stories? What if I cleared out my story dresser? What if every story I experienced was sacred, by accident, gift or creation? What would that be like? I don't know.

One issue that becomes immediately apparent when you start thinking about stories as opposed to clothes is that sacred stories are not always visible from the outside. It reminds me of one part in The Neverending Story about doors:

There are many doors to Fantastica. There are other such magical books. A lot of people read them without noticing. It all depends on who lays hands on the book.

Which stories are sacred is something you might only find out decades later, so if you pick and choose in advance you may miss what is most important. It's a hard question to answer. But certainly finding a way to build more stories yourself and buy fewer off the shelf would be a start. That leads me to consider ...

(This two-part post is continued here.)

E-books and the reading marriage

Those who read the recent posts (one, two) about my attempts to recall novels I'd read on an e-book reader will be interested in some little recursive reading I've been doing lately on the neurology of reading.

Pretty much what I said

Recently Jonah Lehrer at Wired has written a variety of short pieces around e-book readers and reading. He points to two pieces of research that seem to mesh with his own feeling that he doesn't remember things as well when he reads them on his Kindle.

First there is the research of the neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene. I've been reading Dehaene's book Reading in the Brain (recommended). The neurological work of Dehaene and (many) others has found that there are two reading pathways in the brain: the lexical (or ventral) route, in which groups of letters are linked directly to dictionaries of meaning, and the phonological (or dorsal) route, in which the sound processing system plays a part. The lexical route dominates for words that are either familiar (like hat) or strangely spelled, thus more difficult to sound out (like women). The phonological route dominates for words we have seen only infrequently (like hatter) or do not know but can sound out (like coproxynaprionate). The phonological route is also dominant when words are difficult to read, as with handwriting or smudged or distorted text.

Lehrer points to research that claims the lexical route is faster and more automatic than the phonological route, which causes people to read on auto-pilot and thus forget more of what they have read. So the extreme predictability and unnatural clarity of reading on e-book readers creates an imbalance toward the lexical route. Hence we forget.

The odd couple

However, as usual, when you peel off the outer layers of exports from science to the popular press, you find things are not as simple as they seem. From what I've read so far (part of Dehaene's book and scattered papers on the web) I have learned some things. To begin with, the two routes are not mutually exclusive but work simultaneously on the same words and even trade information back and forth.

And whether the lexical route is indeed faster and more "automatic" is not fixed but a matter of debate. The dual-route theory is not the only theory of how lexical and phonological processes combine to support reading. Another theory is put forth mainly by Guy Van Orden at the University of Cincinnati. I think he used to call it something to do with resonance, but lately it goes by the name of the covariant learning hypothesis. According to this theory, well, I'll let this 1998 paper (by Luo, Johnson and Gallo, in Memory and Cognition, which by the way claims the phonological route is faster) describe it better than I can:

[A] word recognition system involves three interconnected components (subsymbols): visual subsymbols, phonological subsymbols, and semantic subsymbols. Presentation of a printed word initiates a massive spread of activation from visual features to linguistic features. After the initial spread of activation, cooperative-competitive dynamics begin among all subsymbols, and coherent structures emerge as relatively stable feedback loops. Eventually, visual–phonologic–semantic dynamics will all settle into a coherent global resonance.

That makes more sense to me than an either/or switch at the start. (Three components? Hold on, I'll get to that later.) Dehaene also says that children vary in which route they rely on most as they learn to read, most people gradually coming to rely on both. Elsewhere I read that adults vary in how much their lexical or phonological routes habitually dominate (possibly based on the conditions under which they learned to read). In the face of such uncertainty, claiming that e-book readers make us forget because they privilege the automatic route to reading ... seems attractive, but simplistic.

The collaborative, emergent view of reading makes more sense intuitively as well. I often find myself policing my own reading. Have you ever caught yourself, while reading, thinking about something else, and realize your eyes have made their way through a paragraph or even a page without you actually knowing what you had read? You fell into eye-scan autopilot, and you have to go back and find out what you had just passed over? Sometimes I scold my eyes for getting ahead of me (and they scold me right back for drifting off the task at hand).

Another trick we play is - I'll bet you've done this - I want to read something that looks enticing in the next section (great heading, or interesting word that jumped out, or weird pattern or figure in the text). But I also want to read the whole text so I don't miss anything important (or so I can say I read the whole thing, if somebody asked me to read it). So I pretend to read, and shuttle my eyes over the intervening text very quickly, essentially paying lip service to reading it. In this case it is often my eyes that do the chastising - hey, go back and read that, cheater. So I don't think it's as simple as one mode being automatic and one requiring conscious effort, and e-books pushing our one gleaming red auto-pilot button. Like old married people, our two reading modes intermingle and interrupt, finishing each other's sentences - literally.

Jumping to conclusions

The second reference Lehrer makes is to a 2010 paper in Cognition (by Connor Diemand-Yauman, Daniel M. Oppenheimer and Erikka B. Vaughan) that has been making the rounds on the web. In this paper the researchers recount how they showed people information about fictional alien creatures in either an easy-to-read "fluid" font or a messy "disfluent" font. They said:

On average, participants in the fluent condition successfully answered 72.8% of the questions [about the aliens]. Meanwhile, participants in the disfluent conditions were successful on average 86.5% of the time. This difference was statistically significant .... In sum, after a 15-min delay, participants in the disfluent condition recalled 14 percentage points more information than those in the fluent condition.

My favorite part of the article:

[I]n some cases making material harder to learn can improve long-term learning and retention... More cognitive engagement leads to deeper processing, which facilitates encoding and subsequently better retrieval... Aptly named "desirable difficulties" capitalize on this by creating additional cognitive burdens that improve learning.

I have mixed reactions to these results. On the one hand, the idea of making things harder leading to more learning and retention makes sense: the squeaky wheel gets the grease, right? Nobody remembers what the auto-pilot does; that is the point of the auto-pilot. But on the other hand, this also sounds a lot like the Hawthorne effect. Maybe the novelty of the change, or the attention implied, in itself increased attention, participation and memory. Also, this is a very narrowly defined experiment, and I would hesitate to believe any broad claims about reading and fonts based on it.

One thing that surprised me about the Cognition paper was how so many online news vendors picked it up and ran with it, with superlative headlines about "e-books make our brains lazy" and the like. (I had some links to show you, but googling it will do as well.) What I can't figure out is this. The paper makes no mention of e-books, or even screens, versus paper. It just talks about fonts and legibility. In fact, at the end of the paper the authors say:

... fluency interventions are extremely cost-effective, and font manipulations could be easily integrated into new printed and electronic educational materials at no additional cost to teachers, school systems, or distributors.

They seem to make no distinction between "printed and electronic" materials. So why has research about fonts regardless of location been co-opted to promote an anti-e-book stance? That's the phenomenon I'm most interested in.

Usually when people say that "research shows" something when it actually doesn't, they either want it to show it, or they are worried it shows it, or both. Why would people want to believe reading on an e-book reduces retention? Why would they be worried about it? Why would they see a research result in a paper when it wasn't there? My guess is that there is something else people are looking for. So I don't think the auto-pilot explanation is necessarily wrong. It's just insufficient. It's too narrow a focus. Maybe people need to study reading not just at the words-and-sentences level but at several levels above it as well. Reading ripples up all the way from the simple act of making sense of marks on a page to making decisions about how we will live our lives. If e-books make us read in a new way, shouldn't we study its effect on those ripples all the way up? And shouldn't the higher ripples impact the design of e-reading devices? Makes sense to me.

Lehrer does say one thing that connects to what I've written about e-books and context:

... I do have a nagging problem with the merger of screens and sentences. My problem is that consumer technology moves in a single direction: It’s constantly making it easier for us to perceive the content. ...I worry that this same impulse – making content easier and easier to see – could actually backfire with books. We will trade away understanding for perception. The words will shimmer on the screen, but the sentences will be quickly forgotten.

I would add that while technology keeps making it easier to perceive content, it keeps making it harder to perceive context.

Three's company

As a final note to this little rumination, I will as usual represent the under-represented when I say that I have failed to read as prescribed in every single exercise I have encountered so far in Dehaene's book.

One example I remember was that he offered a string of words and gave his reader the task of picking out which ones referred to parts of the human body. One of the words was "hare." He said, "I'll bet you took longer to decide about that word, because it sounds like "hair." I actually burst out laughing. To a synaesthete, the words "hare" and "hair" are like - well, to choose a pair that springs to mind, "bicycle" and "fish." I could not possibly mix those words together in my mind, nor take a millisecond to decide which is which.

Actually, reading this book about reading has solved a lifelong mystery for me. I have always read about twice as fast as everyone I know. I knew this as early as fourth grade when a reading specialist came into the classrom one day. He set up his apparatus, then asked us all to watch as words flashed on the screen. We were to hold up our hands, then put them down when we could no longer follow the increasingly rapid word changes. I got absorbed in the words - I think they told a story - then was disappointed when the machine suddenly broke down and stopped showing words. Still holding up my hand, I looked around to find (to my horror) that everyone in the room was staring at me. The machine hadn't broken down. The test was over. It couldn't go any faster than that. This was one of the more traumatic moments of fourth grade, surpassing being sent to stand in the corner for an entire hour for whispering in class.

Well, now I know why that broken-projector thing happened. It is the same reason I failed Dehaene's tests. I don't have two reading spouses, I have three. Synaesthesia is the third spouse. (Rather than start a polygyny polyandry discussion let's just say there are three genders, okay?) This, I think, must be the system of "visual subsymbols" referred to by the Luo et al. paper I quoted from above. At least that's the only reference I've seen to three possible reading partners.

But the third spouse in my reading marriage is choosy. When the colors/sounds/shapes/tastes/emotions of the words and sentences don't cohere, she stomps off angrily and abandons the effort. I call this sort of writing "cardboard" writing and read it slowly and painfully. I have even avoided whole books because they tasted like cardboard. Ralph Stacey is one author with excellent ideas unfortunately clothed in cardboard words. My favorite writing is done by fellow synaesthetes, but it has the opposite problem. The works of Nabokov are so engaging to the third spouse that she becomes overwhelmed with emotion and has to take breaks to calm herself. With coherent but not overwhelming writing, the three spouses collaborate splendidly, helping each other with every little problem.

The three spouses also collaborate when I write. I constantly make little jokes in my word choices of which most people are probably not aware, or only subliminally so. Once in a letter to my brother I wrote that I was having a "rapid spasm of panic" - a joke because in fact that series of words, in my synaesthetic system, is a paragon of calm. (I of course chose the word "paragon" because it is a paragon of calm itself. If I had wanted to make a joke, I would have said it was the epitome of calm.) I've seen other people make these jokes too - there are some real howlers in Nabokov's writing.

So, what is the reaction of the third spouse to e-books? I can tell you instantly that she does not like them. Looking through that little window puts a tinge on all the words that saps the saturation out of their colors and the expression out of their emotions. The window may be translucent, but it is not transparent. The third spouse does not leave the picture entirely when I read e-books, but she does mutter under her breath a lot. And for me, the third spouse is a big part of memory. When she does not participate fully, I have a much harder time remembering what I have read. I often remember stories, articles, names, as much for their physical natures as for their meanings. If you ask me the name of a researcher who studied something, I am more likely to tell you the color of the name than anything else about it (though often I don't actually say the color because it means nothing outside of my head). Some books are easy to call to mind because they smell like freshly baked bread, and so on. With this understanding, brought on by my failure to read as Dehaene expects, I begin to understand much better why I want to abandon e-books.

What is your point? Asks the impatient reader. Synaethesia, while mildly interesting to most, has a brief interest life-span, after which it becomes, apparently, excruciatingly boring. My husband at this point practically runs away when I mention it, poor man. Imagine somebody listening to you drone on about the many ways in which your lawn mower works, or doesn't, and you will understand. [Update: Said husband read that and said No I don't, in an inaccurately-represented sort of way, so I take it back. .ti noitnem I nehw yawa snur eH] In one of those little joke-paradoxes the universe loves so much, the joining of the senses that is synaesthesia has a socially isolating effect on those who have it. And there is also the problem that whenever you try to talk about it you seem strange, thus unreliable. Nobody listens to what the talking dog has to say.

So, that point? Yes. It is that as people study synaesthesia more and more, they find that more and more people have it. To someone who has been following the field (even contributing to it, as an occasional subject) that means something. Sure, some people have it in spades, as I do, but many others have it in thimbles. It may influence far more people than researchers now understand. I think the prevalence has to be higher than reported, because otherwise the percentage of cardboard writing would be much higher. (I put it at about twenty-five percent.) And I have a suspicion that at least some people might be getting my word jokes. So the probability that you have a third spouse in your reading marriage is most definitely not zero, and that third member is probably not enthusiastic about e-books. (Sadly, Dehaene touches on synaesthesia in his book only in the typical, talking-dog way, saying only that some strange people are "convinced" they "see" colors when they read. Opportunity squandered. Anybody else like to take this up?)

Now, being a software designer of sorts, I immediately begin to wonder how e-book readers could improve on this situation. My e-book reader (the Sony Reader) has what is called e-ink, as do most. It looks astonishingly like a printed page ... but somehow it doesn't either. The third spouse is not content. Because of the complexity of the brain, I'm not sure it is possible to find first principles with which to design for sense mixing. I think it must have to be done on an experimental basis. Because sense-mixing happens below the conscious level we are not fully aware of its rules. We may just have to do what parents do with their babies: keep trying things until it stops bawling and starts cooing. And different babies coo at different things, so we may well see e-book readers disperse into a multi-dimensional array of what-works-for-some approaches. Given what I've seen in the way people read and write, that is what I'd be least surprised to see if I jumped forward in time twenty years.

By the way, I made up coproxynaprionate. You googled it, didn't you? Is that healthy? I'm just asking.