About Sensemaker and following Chris’ comment on the 28th

One of the experiences we have had with narrative capture involves the process of persuading people to actually go into a web site and tell a story, a fragment, a small narrative piece. I know Dave always comes up with a whole swag of ways to capture the data, but in practice I have found it very difficult to actually get people to tell their story.

We have tried giving them examples, having them practice, getting other people to interview them, providing incentives, even emotional and organisational blackmail but in the end, have succeeded in only a relatively small percentage of cases to get quality narrative.

Sometimes I have thought that the stimulus situations we give them, e.g. “Imagine that you are at a bar-b-q …” are one of the reasons they block, or that the very process of committing to print is the problem, so we have followed one of Dave’s suggestions and done voice record, but this does not seem to have produced much really better quality of narrative.

So, let me start this fortnight as a guest blogger by wondering, electronically whether, out there in electronic network land, there are people, actual live flesh and bone ones, with encouraging thoughts about what might be a better way to think about narrative and its capture than I am presently doing?