Developing your narrative competence
Shawn recently blogged an interesting post on how to develop your narrative competence. The value of a developed sense of narrative competence is well recognised in the Medical field.
Here’s an interesting one for pictorial narratives*.
Do you think the figures below are both narratives?
(*- From “Narrative Representation to Narrative Use: Towards the Limits of Definition – NARRATIVE, Vol. 13, No. 2 (May 2005)”)
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I was expecting a few comments on this one, so, I might as well make that expectation come true. 🙂
The answer of whether the two figures are narrative comes down to: ‘it depends’.
Most people will have no problems seeing the Calvin and Hobbes figure as a narrative, it is the second one, which reads more like instructions which is challenging. However, it is possible to consider in several thousand years a team of archeologists discovering this picture and ‘reading as’ as narrative of how an ancient civilization put alot of effort and work into building a special object….
The point I guess is that ‘it depends’ on what the point of the narrative is for, what is its use.
Regards,
Andrew
On the other hand, if you had never seen a cartoon strip before, the Calvin & Hobbes might be mystifying.
Do you go from left to write or write to left? Is this one snapshot in time showing four quadruplets?
Picture systems have a grammar of their own…