Story means both narratively patterned information and the experience of a story. A story is structured by the chronology of narrative (beginning, middle, end) and the logic of narrative (character, setting, plot). Prior LIS scholarship has considered story as folktale in scholarship that mapped collections and set standards for sources notes describing oral stories captured in print (Hearne, 1999; MacDonald, 1982; Sturm, 1999). These primarily empirical approaches are complementary to semiotic approaches from narratology, which explicitly connecting social and cultural knowledge with the experience of a story (Barthes, 1974). In other words, stories can persist in remarkably similar forms over long spans of time around the world while, at the same time, each audience interprets stories through collective narrative experience. As one sociologist said, “We expect ambiguity in narrative, that is, words and events will not mean what at first they seem to” (Polletta, 2006). Stories as information are both pre-structured and socially constructed, bridging the usual disconnect betwen empirical and constructionist ways of knowing.

S-DIKW Framework

Storytelling polishes stories like editing polishes essays, with the audience serving as editor. S-DIKW is a new framework, based on the well-known data, information, knowledge, and wisdom hierarchy (DIKW), for analyzing storytelling as information (McDowell, 2021).

This framework suggests a paradigm shift in information research, reframing storytelling as a key site of investigation for the information sciences and taking collective meaning making seriously.

S-DIKW framework:

• S-Data: Ability to identify and interpret data from which information emerges that can be communicated in story.
• S-Information: Ability to inform audiences by communicating data with context as story, in both form and narrative experience.
• S-Knowledge: Ability to convey knowledge as complex actionable information through the construction and telling of a story, incorporating cultural and contextual cues. S-knowledge is shared frequently in innovative or experimental contexts.
• S-Wisdom: Ability to know which story to tell—including when, how, and to whom—in order to convey wisdom.

Each level of this framework is about a subset of storytelling abilities which can be identified in action. S-Information builds on the ability to interpret S-Data, and communicate data with story context. S-Knowledge is information in action, constructed and shared as a story. S-Wisdom can potentially emerge from the storytelling triangle and at minimum requires the complex ability to select which story to tell when, how, and to whom. While wisdom is notoriously tricky to identify and define, is has long been associated with stories and storytelling in many cultural traditions.

S-Data

In storytelling terms, data are like semes, which are the smallest units of signification in semiology (Barthes, 1974) or motifs which the smallest elements of a folktale that persists in tradition (Clarkson & Cross, 1980). Despite frequent uses of “data-driven” or the verb “emerge” to describe analysis, and despite data being accurate and empirically valid, data can be told in story only after human interpretation. Data in story context becomes information.

S-Information

Any expert-as-storyteller is able to express the same information in different ways in order to reach different audiences. Audiences influence various ways that information in story is retold over time, as their reactions add collective understandings to the story. However, information in story does not infinitely collapse into audience-pleasing. Stories contain information in a story structure that both persists over time and changes through retelling. The audience serves as editor, but the storyteller is still the author.

S-Knowledge

Stories can do more than inform; a powerful story also moves the audience emotionally, especially when a story contains valuable lessons or insights. Audiences are more likely to listen to a story if they understand that, in doing so, they might gain knowledge. Story can help make complex sequences easy to remember, with a plot that communicates how one event leads to another. Story can also give lasting form to organizational memory when important moments of an organization’s history—its founding, weathering crisis, transformation of vision—are retold over time. Knowledge communicated in story can guide the knower’s tone and gesture along with their actions, because knowledge in story communicates not only what to do but how to do it the right way and offers an example of why. However, in some cases, knowledge of how to do something is not enough, such as when conflicts exist over information and/or data. In uncertain, conflictual, or paradoxical situations, we need wisdom.

S-Wisdom

Wisdom is challenging to define. In story, wisdom often means discovering a way beyond the ways that seem obvious. The hero might succeed by doing the unexpected, such as answering a test with a test. Wisdom can be the province of groups as well as individuals. For example, in a Haitian folktale, the girl Tipingee’s stepmother tries to give her away as a servant to a stranger. The stepmother dresses her in red to mark her for taking, but Tipingee overhears and shares the plan with all of the village girls. So they all wear red, hiding her in plain sight, and repeat the (infectious) chorus of “I’m Tipingee, she’s Tipingee, we’re Tipingee too,” until the stranger takes the stepmother instead (Ragan, 1998; Wolkstein & Henriquez, 1980). The audience might hear the moral of the Tipingee story as any of these: that the village should stick together, children should stick together, adults do not always have children’s best interests at heart, the powerful do not always have the interests of the vulnerable at heart, a combination of these, or something else. Choosing to communicate information by telling a story effectively involves one aspect of wisdom.Wisdom may also entail knowing which story to tell when and why, which involves profoundly social and contextual insights. Researching when information is communicated via story—not in spite of but because of its inherent ambiguity or interpretive openness—could reveal moments of enacted wisdom, providing clues to how individuals and groups develop wisdom.

Story is a fundamental information form, and storytelling is foundational to needed definitions of collective information. Connecting empirical and social constructionist epistemologies, the S-DIKW framework provides a way of understanding storytelling as information in action. Understanding information as story reveals the need for a paradigm shift, away from an implicit information individualism and toward story as information, storytelling as communication, and information as collective. Applying this framework will allow for better understandings of a wide range of informative storytelling, from collective knowledge to current crises in misinformation, as will be discussed in Part 2.

References

Barthes, R. (1974). S/Z: an essay. New York: Hill and Wang.

Bishop, K., & Kimball, M. A. (2006). Engaging Students in Storytelling. Teacher Librarian, 33(4), 28–31.

Clarkson, A., & Cross, G. B. (1980). World folktales. Retrieved from https://vufind.carli.illinois.edu/vf-uiu/Record/uiu_399322

Hearne, B. (1999). Swapping tales and stealing stories: The ethics and aesthetics of folklore in children’s literature. Library Trends, 47(3), 509–528.

MacDonald, M. R. (1982). The storyteller’s sourcebook : a subject, title, and motif index to folklore collections for children (1st editio). Detroit, Mich: Neal-Schuman with Gale Research.

McDowell, K. (2020). Storytelling, Young Adults, and Three Paradoxes. In A. Bernier (Ed.), Transforming Young Adult Services, second edition (2nd ed., pp. 93–109). Chicago, IL: American Library Association-Neal Schuman.

McDowell, K. (2021). Storytelling wisdom: Story, information, and DIKW. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 72(10 (Special Issue: Paradigm Shift in the Field of Information)), 1223–1233. https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.24466

Polletta, F. (2006). It Was Like a Fever: Storytelling in Protest and Politics. https://doi.org/10.1177/009430610803700327

Ragan, K. (1998). Fearless girls, wise women, and beloved sisters : heroines in folktales from around the world (1st ed.). New York : W.W. Norton.

Sturm, B. W. (1999). The Enchanted Imagination: Storytelling’s Power to Entrance Listeners. School Library Media Research, 2, 1–21.

Wolkstein, D., & Henriquez, E. (1980). The magic orange tree, and other Haitian folktales . New York: Schocken Books.