References The contributions of narrative to medical ethics come primarily in two ways: firstly, from the use of stories (narratives) for their mimetic content—that is, for what they say; and secondly, from the methods of literary criticism and narrative theory for their analysis of diegetic form—that is, for their understanding of how stories are told and why it matters. Although narrative and...

Narrative theory or narratology is the systematic study of narrative and narrative structure [3]. It provides the necessary theoretical tools that can help scrutinize the various ways in which narrative is formed and is deciphered by an audience. In this paper, we suggest the use of narrative theory as: (a) a means to a detailed deconstruction or engineering of a collaborative design process, a...

Two decades ago inquiry into narrative played but a minor role in scholarly deliberation; the relationship between narrative analysis and historiography was little explored; the term "narrative" had scarcely entered the vocabulary of psychological science. Today the study of narrative concatenates throughout the humanities and the social sciences, and the problems raised by such analyses for ou...

MOTT, BRADFORD WAYNE. Decision-Theoretic Narrative Planning for Guided Exploratory Learning Environments. (Under the direction of James C. Lester and R. Michael Young.) Interactive narrative environments have been the focus of increasing attention in recent years. A key challenge posed by these environments is narrative planning, in which a director agent orchestrates all of the events in an in...

This paper proposes an understanding of literary narrative as a form of social cognition and situates the study of such narratives in relation to the new comprehensive approach to human cognition, enaction. The particular form of enactive cognition that narrative understanding is proposed to depend on is that of participatory sense-making, as developed in the work of Di Paolo and De Jaegher. Cu...

OBJECTIVES To review how heterogeneity has been examined in systematic reviews of diagnostic test accuracy studies. DATA SOURCES Centre for Reviews and Dissemination's Database of Abstracts of Reviews of Effects (DARE). REVIEW METHODS Systematic reviews that evaluated a diagnostic or screening test by including studies that compared a test with a reference test were identified from DARE. Re...

This paper reviews and critiques the different approaches to the use of narrative in quality improvement research. The defining characteristics of narrative are chronology (unfolding over time); emplotment (the literary juxtaposing of actions and events in an implicitly causal sequence); trouble (that is, harm or the risk of harm); and embeddedness (the personal story nests within a particular ...

In this paper we consider the clash between the pre-scripted character of much narrative and the freedom afforded by a Virtual Environment. We discuss the concept of emergent narrative as a possible way of avoiding this clash. We examine the role of a VE user in a narrative and consider the concept of social presence as a means of reconciling the freedom of the user with the constraints of an e...