The exhibits in Stories that Speak to Us provide one powerful means of exploring the relationships among the more than 3,600 narratives contained in the DALN to date. Each exhibit analyzes three to seven narratives that the guest curator(s) had a hand in recording for the DALN or that others recorded as a group, circumstances that provide the curator(s) with coherent threads across the narratives under consideration and, in groups of narratives they helped to record, access to contextual information typically unavailable to visitors to the DALN.
Imagine, however, that you arrive at the DALN site without having visited the curated exhibits in this collection or having previously read any literacy narratives in the DALN. Where to start? If you read, view, or listen to a narrative at random, which do you read next? Once you have read two or more narratives, how do you discover other narratives that help you reflect on their similarities and differences?
Further, imagine that after visiting Alanna Frost and Suzanne Blum Malley's exhibit, "Multilingual Literacy Landscapes," you decide to explore some other narratives that focus on "multilingual" literacy narratives. As of this writing, if you search for "multilingual" using the Quick Search feature on the DALN Web site, your search returns eight narratives, none of which correspond with the five narratives discussed by Frost and Malley. What do those results suggest about the relationships between the search results and the narratives in Frost and Malley's exhibit?
The first scenario sketched above suggests a primarily instrumental problem solvable by the familiar acts of searching and browsing a database to find items—in this case, literacy narratives—of interest. The second scenario suggests that there is interpretive work involved in understanding the DALN database and the relationships encoded in it, work akin to reading the narratives themselves.
How do you "read" a database of 3,600-plus personal literacy narratives?
In his Foreword to this collection, David Bloome characterizes the “traditional” manner of reading the exhibits in Stories That Speak to Us: “The reader seeks to understand the argument made by the author – the claim, the evidence for it, the warrants, responses to potential counter arguments, etc.—and then evaluates the validity of the argument.” After acknowledging the value of such reading, he proceeds to offer four additional “unruly” ways to read the exhibits, approaches to reading that highlight unique characteristics of the narratives featured in the exhibits and the larger project of which they are a part. For example, his first unruly reading considers literacy narratives in the DALN in light of other archives of personal stories or “representations of everyday life (including literacy in everyday life) that have some potential for allowing people to reclaim ownership over at least some aspects of their lives.” Accordingly, he suggests that, whatever the analytical lens through which a guest curator presents the narratives, we might attend to the ways in which the narrators (re)define literacy. Extending that line of reasoning, Bloome argues further that we might attend to the “particularities“ of each literacy narrative, resisting the urge to read narratives as support for a thesis.
In the following exhibit, I propose yet another unruly way of reading the narratives and exhibits in Stories That Speak to Us, one that explores connections between the narratives understood as autonomous texts and the narratives viewed as texts deliberately contributed to and contained in an online database of texts that contains additional information about the narratives supplied by the narrators and about the archive’s infrastructure.
This exhibit will suggest some strategies, and provide some custom tools, for reading the evolving contents of the DALN database—metadata and narratives considered as a network of meaning—and discovering clusters of narratives that might reward reading in relationship to one another, clusters and relationships that readers might not discover without tools that guide them beyond their experience and expectations.