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Research Centre for Educational HCI, RoyalDanish School of Educational Studies, RoskildeUniversity, Box 260, DK-4000 Roskilde, lg@dlh.dk

Narrative, Genre and Contextin Popular Science

LISA GJEDDE

There is no story that is not embedded in other

stories. Fisher: ”Narration, Reason and Com-munity.” Suny 1997

Genre, Story and KnowledgePopular Science as a genre scaffolds a set of ex-pectations and hypothesis the audience holds, oneof them being that what they read about deals withfact not fiction. The readers are able to explicatesome of this knowledge as stories about what theirexpectations are and according to cognitive psy-chologist Roger Schank such knowledge is storedand also serve as indices to stories. So genre andstory are two concepts that interrelate closely, whenit comes to exploring how genre functions on a cog-nitive level and looking at its qualities within aframework of cognitive theories and models thatdeals with schemas, scripts and stories. (Schank1990; Huckin 1995)

”Genres are intellectual scaffolds on which com-munity-based knowledge is constructed” (Huckin1995) Berkensdotter & Huckin use this definition ofgenre in disciplinary communications where theyare dealing with genre from a socio-cognitive per-spective.

It points to the cognitive importance and impactof genre. Seeing stories as fundamental to scaffold-ing knowledge (Schank 1990), one might raise thequestion if this cognitive concept of genre impliesgenre as comprising some of the stories withinwhich other stories are imbedded? How does it re-late to qualities like comprehension, relevance and

credibility, and how are the narrative responses,that serve to generate meaning, to the different gen-res?

What are the cognitive implications of the genrethat is inscribed through textual elements? Whatare the readers criteria for how they perceive thecredibility of the articles?

How can it be related to the readers situated cog-nition, to their background and gender, to their per-sonal contexts and how can it be seen reflecting intheir retellings?

This present article undertakes to look at a fewof these issues in particular those dealing with gen-der and the readers comprehension of the gist of ar-ticles in relation to level of narrative, and how rel-evance and credibility is perceived and constructed.

Genre and Situated CognitionIn line with this approach is the idea that “genreknowledge is a form of “situated cognition”(Brown, Collins & Duguid, 1989) that continues todevelop as we participate in the activities of the am-bient culture.” (Huckin 1995)

The genre of Popular Science is wide, as (Shinn1985) Shinn and Cloître defines it, though they donot reflect on narrative as a format for it. It consistsof a continuum, rather than clearly demarcated styl-istic markers. One of the markers Shinn and Cloîtrepoints to, the imagery, have together with emotivelanguage and narrative structure been variables in areconstruction of 4 articles from a popular sciencemagazine, that forms the corpus of this research to-gether with the retellings and qualitative interviewsby the 16 participants. These articles are rewrittento depict subtle changes of the narrative form withinthe genre of a Popular Science magazine rangingfrom full narrative to encyclopaedic style texts.

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The subtle levels of genre, or micro-levelsmight only be perceptible to the readers when ex-posed to the same article in different versions as Idid in the pilot version of this study. The final de-sign employing different versions in the differentarticles did not make these shifts and manipula-tions immediately transparent to the readers. None-theless differences in the retellings and the narra-tive involvement of the reader indicate that theirresponses to the different levels of narrative wereboth influenced by the level of narrative and theirprevious knowledge about the topic, which otherstories they had to draw upon to create relevance.To the extent of having little previous knowledge,no education or not many stories of ones own todraw upon, it was more important with the higherlevel of narrative in the magazine to draw upon.

Using the term micro-levels of genre is not im-plying a hierarchy as such. But it does refer to theway that the constituents ranging from narrativelevel to topic to genre interrelates and affects theperceptions of the informant. The findings indicatethat preference for topic overrides preference forlevel of narrative. And also that the individual in-formants construction of and expectations to thegenre of popular science varies according to per-sonal habitus.

Narrative, Context and RelevanceNarrative is very prominent in the media, it is atplay not only in fiction but it is also used in docu-mentary and drama-documentary, it is studied andemployed in a wide array of genres ranging fromfull-fledged fiction to providing the structure of anotherwise dry documentary. There is a continuumwhich moves from a full-blown fiction film(Branigan 1992) to the underlying narrative struc-ture in Scientific discourse. (Greimas 1990)

Narrative has traditionally been a popular formatfor transmission of knowledge, and for using thestories for insight and transformation. The parablesof the Bible and the stories from the Arabian Nightare examples of the great diversity. Jesus andScherazade were both highly skilled storytellers andtheir narratives served the enlightenment of theirlisteners even in very different universes.

Folktales have traditionally been receptacles ofknowledge and wisdom; Analytical psychologistslike Jung, (Franz 1970) and Bettelheim (Bettelheim1984) have uncovered some levels of it. Anothercognitive level has been at the focus of work in ex-perimental psychology (Bartlett 1932, 1995) struc-

turalism (Propp 1968, 1928; Greimas 1990; Mand-ler 1984), where the focus has been on constructingmodels for a storygrammar. Another avenue ofstructural modelling has been done in the socio-lingvistic work of Labov and Waletzsky (Labov1967, 1997).

This has resulted in a number of studies focus-ing on the linguistic levels but not on the contex-tual levels. Thus not addressing the levels of narra-tive construction at the level where it deals withthe process not just of structuring information butalso how the structure interacts with the readersother stories, or storied information (borrowing theterm storied from Sarbin). (Sarbin 1986) This levelhas to do with personal and cultural context andwith the construction of relevance. This construc-tion of relevance has to do with what could betermed the reader’s superthemes. Or the basic orfundamental or guiding beliefs of the person.

In this connection there is a situatedness of thenarrative which refers to the use of narrative to em-bed the information in a narrativized context, andthus to create a link to sensed reality. A reality,which can be visualised and photographed andtransformed into human interactions or human pro-jections on animals, stars, natural phenomena of anykind and which conforms to some basic narrativetraits.

Aim of the StudyThis study is based on exploring the use of narrativein applied communications, through an empiricalstudy of a popular science magazine. Through anexperimental design, the readers interaction withprocess of narrative comprehension and construc-tion are explored; how they make sense of the mate-rial according to gender and background. Also theirpreferences and reading strategies, by presentingthe readers with a number of reconstructed articles,each representing a particular aspect of a narrativecontinuum. Through the experimental receptionmethod (Ingemann 1998, Gjedde & Ingemann1999) a number of parameters are activated whichremoves the situation from the mere exchange ofopinions of the informant, to another dimension thatcalls for the action of the informant. This action istaking place at several levels, which makes it possi-ble to interpolate them. To create a triangulation ofthe data thus elicited by the informant’s retellings,interviews and ratings of the articles. It is then pos-sible to use them to clarify and enlighten certain as-pects, which call for a different level of analysis

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than the level of data obtained through mere an-swering of questions allows for.

Background and Scope for the StudyApplied Communications is an academic disciplinebased on the communication of science and subjectsof public interest, to a wide, often naïve audience,within a variety of media and often based on carefulanalysis of the potential target groups. Seen fromthe point of view of that discipline, it is of impor-tance and of interest to monitor just how the readersgo about constructing meaning and making sense ofdifferent types of text in order to properly evaluatethe use of narrative in this area.

How the readers perceive the credibility of thetexts and how they become interested, involved andperceive relevance.

Another motivation is to add empirical know-ledge to the construction of a viable productiontheory for the field.

MethodologyThis study attempts through application of experi-mental reception methods (Gjedde & Ingemann1999) to examine the interplay between reader, textand context in a popular science magazine. Thevariables used are 4 actual articles from this maga-zine in the original version plus 3 reconstructed ver-sions, altogether comprising 16 articles with vary-ing degrees of narrative language. These articles aregrouped into 4 sets and presented to a panel of 16natural readers of this magazine, selected on the ba-sis of a questionnaire that was distributed to 300randomly selected subscribers, with an equal distri-bution between male and female subscribers. Theonly criterion being that they had been subscribingto the magazine for more than a year and lived inthe greater Copenhagen area. The rate of answeredquestionnaires was about 30%, with a higher returnrate for men than women.

On the basis of these questionnaires a selectionwas made that aimed at representing a wide varietyof age, education and vocations in the panel. And toprovide an equal representation according to gender.It was however not possible to actually make thisrepresentation across gender and vocation as equalas anticipated. Both due to the larger number of menthan women that answered the questionnaires andthat there was an uneven distribution amongst man

and women in the representation of age and educa-tion. This was due to the way the panel was gener-ated, based on natural readers of the magazine.

The panel on whole covers ages from 15 to 70years old. They represent variations in educationalbackground from leaving school after the first 7years to being a medical specialist.

Narrative in Applied Communications(Popular Science)

It is a popular assumption that narrative is a usefulformat for reaching a wider audience and communi-cating complex subjects to a naïve (in the scientificmeaning) audience. (Jensen 1995, 2. udgave, 2.oplag. 1. udg. 1987) It is proposed that IllustratedScience is an example of a successful application ofa genre, which involves narrative to communicatescience to a wider audience.

This study undertakes to look at the relationshipbetween narrative and cognitive aspects of the read-er’s perception, within an expanded view of cogni-tion that also deals with emotive and aesthetic as-pects of cognition. (Gjedde 1998) It deals with howthe narrative continuum, elements depicted in thedifferent versions interplay with the informants sub-jective and subliminal perceptions, as it can be seenthrough their retellings and the qualitative researchinterviews. How their narratives are constructed intheir process of making meaning of the informationthey perceive and can be seen responded to in theretellings and interviews. How they respond to thedifferent indicators of genre ranges from the ency-clopaedic to the full narrative versions employingboth narrative structure and narrative language.

Can all this be seen to influence the retellings ofthe informants and their comprehension and con-struction of meaning and credibility?

Narrative, Contextand Credibility for Two ReadersBackground

Hanna is a subscriber for the past 15 years. She isan old-age pensioner, 69 years old. She has a highschool degree. She studied psychology at Univer-sity, but did not finish it. She is the mother of sevenchildren, and has been helping her husband with ad-ministrative duties in his business as a plumber. I dothe interview with her at a table, which is cluttered

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with signs of her activities, knitting and sewing.One of her young grandchildren is running aroundin the room next to where we sit.

She expresses her reasons for reading the maga-zine like this:

Science has to be communicated so that WEcan make use of it ... the scientists should not

be sitting in an ivory tower. Ordinary people

also need to know. And for me personally whohas a desire for knowledge STILL, for me it is

rather important.

Frederik is a subscriber for the past 4 years. He isa high school graduate mathematics major, aged 19,who works in a photo-shop temporally.

He is still living at home with his parents in atastefully furnished house in a nice area. His mothergreets me kindly and then disappears while we sit inthe kitchen.

He says about his reasons for reading the maga-zine:

It is obviously some rather big subjects, and

[one needs] to have them condensed so thatyou get a good taste of it ... get an introduction

to it in a non-technical way, so that it is

comprehensible. If it then is something thatinterest you then you can go on and look for

more about it, cant you? So it is like a short

introduction to a lot of interesting subjects and... comprehensible for ordinary people.

The Readers Constructionof Criteria for CredibilityOne of the questions in the series of semi-structuredqualitative interviews was whether the informantsbelieved the text to be credible. This question wasasked to see if there was any correlation betweenconstruction of credibility and the level of narrativeused. A number of different criteria for credibilityemerged in response to the different articles, indi-cating that it is a fluid process going on betweenreader and text. And that the perception of topic andprevious knowledge are important parameters to-gether with the informants worldview and ideasabout science.

Hanna exemplifies a number of different criteriain her responses:

To the article on astronomy, in the encyclopae-dic (B) version, she responded:

Yes, with those measuring instruments they

have today, I believe it is quite credible.

So she is constructing her criteria for credibilityfrom within the scientific norms of measurabilityand quantification, a positivistic approach. She isadvocating the mainstream scientific norms forgood and credible science.

Hanna is answering the question about cred-ibility of this full narrative version A on the sub-ject of thought-transference with a story that hasa literary reference in spite of the article having noliterary references. In this she is responding to thetopic of the article, and possibly also to the narra-tive level of it, this response fits well with thetheory that stories evoke more stories (Schank1990), that they help imbed knowledge and accessprevious knowledge. It is a tendency in this studythat the articles with a high level of narrative evokemore narrative responses.

Was it Alexander Dumas who wrote” TheCorsican Brothers” – they were twins, and one

of them became a scoundrel and the other

became a HERO, and when one of them werewounded then the other would suffer. But

THAT was a novel. But I don’t think this was

credible.

In this way she conveys that she does not find thearticle credible, and with a few words she evokesanother genre which she think suits the topic better.This particular article did evoke vastly different re-sponses and half the group of female readers had itas their first choice. While the other half like Hannahad it as their least preferred article.

Like Hanna Frederik also has a narrative re-sponse to the Ara in version (A) with full narra-tive, where he is situating the information in rela-tion to prior relations and interests:

When I was a young boy I had a friend who

really was into biology. So we had plans about

becoming marine biologists and travelling toAustralia to study the parrots there and then

to the Amazon and study the Ara parrots... So

I do know a little about a lot of these thingsbut I haven’t really got into it in depth.

His personal narrative in response to the full narra-tive version is pointing to the narrative quality ofthe involvement of the reader, by activating similarprevious knowledge. It is representative of anumber of similar personal narratives produced byother informants in response to narrative or topicalimpulses.

The biology article on the breeding patterns of seahorses was a version D, which was a perceived by

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Hanna as “Extremely credible”. She already hadextensive knowledge about this subject matter, andwas able to judge the credibility by what she al-ready knew.

The article version C on ornithology did shealso find fully credible, it was also a subject withwhich she was familiar and thus capable of judgingfrom previous knowledge. None of those evokedpersonal narratives that related the information topersonal experiences, but a personal narrative wasprompted in relation to the version C, which has thenarrative elements of emotive and imagery lan-guage.

Frederik’s construction of credibility of the articleabout astronomy version D:

I find it quite credible in what it says. Every

time there is a statement it refers to someonewho has said it ... But it still does speculate on

behalf of others. Still there is something I can-

not quite pinpoint. They do not present[enough] cold, cynical facts ...

So Jens has two criteria for credibility: one beingthat the article to be credible must present ”cold andcynical facts” and one that being that it must not”speculate”.

Both these criteria clashes with the narrative em-bedding of this material, and the more he is beingreflexive about the ”speculations” that are present inthe article, the more his original impression of thecredibility of the article is being challenged.

Frederik judges the seahorse-article in encyclo-paedic (B) version to be:

Rather credible because it is documented asfacts ... but no sources are mentioned so it is

rated as 2 (on a scale from 1-7, 1 being the

highest level of credibility)

This encyclopaedic version has ”no speculations”,as it has no narrative language or structure whichmakes him rate the article as rather credible in spiteof the lack of sources.

In Frederik’s criteria for credibility of the Arain version (A) with full narrative, it is apparentthat he is rating it as less credible, because of thesome of the expression which he judges to be lessclear and factual: ”it [the article] cannot decidewhether it is facts or guesswork.”

So he is implying it from what he has read,which he finds sort of ”trying to mystify it by beingvague and then coming up with a perfectly clearexplanation of the phenomena in the end”

Frederik’s comments on the thought-transfer-ence article version C.: ”I thought it had very lowcredibility. It said nothing, it seemed like just blah,blah.”

He rates it very low for credibility and has thearticle as his second last choice – this is a patternamong all the readers that an article that is rated lowfor credibility is not a preferred choice, when askedto make priorities.

Reading for RelevanceThe elder women (ages 52-69) are most explicit,about situating their reading in a social context –they find an added dimension of meaning throughwhat their immediate relatives, sons and daughtersare interested in, adding to their own interest whichare motivated by a desire for knowledge, and some-times by special subjects like astronomy.

Most of them are not only motivated by personalinterest in any subject matter, though they of coursehave special interests or preferred areas of know-ledge. They are reading ”everything”, and then theyare constructing relevance through the anticipatedinterests of the people they connect the subject mat-ter to, when reading.

So this knowledge serves two function’s – to sat-isfy ”a desire for knowledge” and as object in com-munications with close relatives. And it is alsothrough these emotional relations that they make adouble sense of the material, the sense it makes forthemselves and the sense they anticipate it willmake for those close relations. So there is a strongelement of situated cognition and of shared cogni-tion in their reading process.

Gender Differences in NarrativePreferences and ComprehensionIn order to see how the different narrative versionswere being understood by the informants I have fo-cused on their comprehension of the gist of the arti-cles, (Schank 1990) in the analysis of their re-tellings of the articles.

There was generally a good comprehension ofthe gist of the articles, though 7 of the 16 inform-ants did miss out on one or more of the articles. Ofthe nine articles they missed the gist of, 6 were en-cyclopaedic-versions, while there was one each ofthe other versions.

Of the eight women interviewed five did notcomprehend the gist of one or more of the articles.These missed four encyclopaedic-versions (B), andone each of versions with narrative language but

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little narrative structure (C) and the original ver-sion (A). The three of these articles were on as-tronomy, two Bs and one C. Two were B-versionsof the psychological article, and one was a versionA on ornithology.

Two of a group of eight men did not comprehendthe gist of the articles – it was one version with littlenarrative language but structure (D) on psychology,and one B-version on psychology and one B-versionon ornithology.

This difficulty in comprehending the gist of theencyclopaedic-versions can be due to severalthings. It can be the fact that the informants as sub-scribers are used to the magazines usual more narra-tive style and that the narrative elements that arethought to aid comprehension were lacking in theseversions (schema-theory (Bartlett 1932, 1995;Mandler 1984). The fact that more women than menmissed out on some of the articles could possibly bedue to the difference in levels of education and age,since the women participants in this had a lowerlevel of education and two were pensioners. Thereare however preferences in other media’s (t.v. –soaps, computer games) that does point in the samedirection, that females have a preference for narra-tive.

I’ve previously been reporting on and discussingaspects of the gender differences. (Gjedde 1998).I’ve found that on a bipolar scale the female inform-ants find the full narrative genre the most compre-hensible and the encyclopaedic genre the least com-prehensible. The male informants on the other handrate the encyclopaedic versions the most compre-hensible while the full narrative are rated the leastcomprehensible.

Since this study has been done with a limitednumber of informants and a complex design, thatnot only involve different versions but also differenttopics and the gender groups are varied in age andlevels of education, I do not make claims for valid-ity, that goes beyond this group of natural readers.These results do however point to interesting areasfor further research in this area.

Gender and Topical Preference

Another gender specific difference emerged whenthe informants made choices about their preferencefor the different articles.

At the end of the interview the informant wasasked to sort the articles hierarchically according topreference. They were posed the question ”Whicharticle do you prefer?” And then asked to put them

in descending order. A pattern of gender specificpreferences emerged, showing distinct differences:

The women concentrated their first choices ontwo of the four articles: half chose the psychologyarticle the other half chose the astronomy article astheir preferred article. And then it polarised the waythat if they did not have one of these articles as theirpreferred article it would end up as their last choicefor most of them.

The men did not polarise in that way as theymade first choices among all the articles. But theydid have a common choice in rating the astronomyarticle highly and having the article about the sea-horse male giving birth as their least preferredchoice. These differences were obviously topical,but on the other hand the topics were influencingthe different styles of the articles, what narrativetraits they acquired both in the process of beingwritten up for the magazine, and in the process ofbeing rewritten for this study. Again this wouldpoint to the possibility of women having differentnarrative preferences than men.

The two articles the females polarised aroundwere the ”softest” topic: psychology and the ”hard-est” topic astronomy, with the astronomy in the en-cyclopaedic form being the most difficult to catchthe gist of.

(The concept of ”soft” and ”hard” topics is usedby the editors of magazine in their editorial policy,for creating a balance and catering to differentgroups.)

Strategies for Making SenseThe informants seemed to use a number of differentstrategies in their reading in order to make sense ofthe articles. In the analysis of the retellings of thevarious articles and versions these strategies can besingled out:

1) Appropriation of actual information:

A) The retellings of the actual information eitherjust mentioning facts, focusing on the actualinformation and rendering it as it is read.

B) Or embedding them in a story.

C) Reformatting the story, making the narrativestructure more pronounced and approximat-ing the structure to canonical oral tale struc-ture, which example can be found repre-sented in Labovs seminal work on oral narra-tives. (Labov 1967, 1997)

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2) Construction of relevance to achieve a mean-ingful context for narrative construction.

3) Construction of emotional and aestheticmeaning which is part of the process of narra-tive construction.

ConclusionThe focus of this research has been to explore therelationship between different levels of narrativewithin the genre of Popular Science, by presenting 4different versions representing micro-levels ofgenre on a continuum ranging from encyclopaediclanguage to a version with narrative structure aswell as imagery and emotive language in a semi-ex-perimental design, and to explore its possible impli-cations for the readers construction of credibilityand comprehension of gist as well as looking at rel-evance and preference. The findings are suggestingsome gender specific differences and preferencesfor narrative on the side of female informants, butalso that topic and context may override genre andthese issues would be an interesting area to furtherexplore.

The main focus has been to explore the readerscriteria, strategies and preferences in relation to thevarying levels of narrative, suggesting that the levelof narrative does have an impact on the readers con-struction of credibility, and their gist comprehen-sion and preferences. These findings are very com-plex, further involving the readers background andcontext.

Genre is seen as something not only inherent inthe magazine read, but as much in the reader’s rela-tion to it and subjective perception of it. So the ex-perience of genre can be seen as situated cognition.And the subtle perceptions of the, often mute, indi-cators of genre, can be explored as the filter throughwhich narrative is perceived and constructed. Thusbeing an element that is actively involved in thereader’s construction of meaning and expanded cog-nition also involving experiential qualities.

Due to the nature of this research with a com-plex design and a limited group of informants, itsfocus is more to identify areas for further researchand to raise further questions than to conclusivelyanswer them.

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