Given these contextual features, the narratives in the DALN, as we have noted elsewhere, are not best understood as historical evidence in the sense of that term’s truth claims within a scientific world view. Like all first-hand accounts, literacy narratives are always partly fictional and always rhetorically interested representations—they are stories that individuals compose by selecting certain details to disclose (and not to disclose), by populating their stories with certain characters (and leaving out mentions of others), and by positioning themselves in alignment with or resistance to these characters in their narratives. With these acts of composition and meaning-making, end users create and compose the DALN as an archive on a continual basis.

In this sense, the DALN does not pretend to be a complete, comprehensive, or historically accurate repository. Rather it is a partial, fragmentary record created and composed by users, one that contains the narratives that individuals choose to tell and that they compose purposefully and rhetorically for telling to others. We can’t say, in short, that these narratives constitute evidence of literacy practices or values as they exist, but rather that they are, as Linda Brodkey points out, cultural artifacts that both directly and indirectly reflect practices of (and the values placed on) literate activities.

As Brodkey (1987) might also point out, however, the DALN narratives are nonetheless rich in meaning. They “twice encode culture,” because they are simultaneously “practices and artifacts” (p. 46). Even though some narratives affirm and some resist “culturally scripted ideas” (Eldred and Mortonson, 1992, p. 513) about literacy, they cannot avoid reflecting, in some way—either directly or indirectly—what it means to read and compose in our culture.

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One studies stories not because they are true or even because they are false, but for the same reason that people tell and listen to them, in order to learn about the terms on which others make sense of their lives:  what they take into account and what they do not; what they consider worth contemplating and what they do not; what they are and are not willing to raise and discuss as problematic or unresolved in life.

(Brodkey, 1987, p. 46)