Research topics
My research services include literature review (though I like to call it "asking questions of the literature" rather than a simple review), conceptual development, research project design, experimentation, and rapid software prototyping (from concept to proof-of-concept).
These are some of the research areas I have explored.
- Narrative inquiry: Getting people to tell "raw" stories about their experiences and answer questions about them in ways that will provide useful insights
- Organisation of narratives: Finding ways to collect, organise and present narrative information in ways that provide maximum insights to address a variety of goals and restrictions
- Uses of narratives for stimulation and disruption: Developing methods to collect and indexing multiple-perspective data useful for detecting emerging patterns, stimulating new perspectives, and disrupting assumptions and fixed patterns of thought
- Language for narrative patterns: Assembling and testing sets of questions that reveal patterns in stories and storytelling events
- Narrative briefing: Helping scientists and policy analysts use narrative forms to convey nuanced understandings of complex issues to decision makers in brief periods of time
- Mass narrative representation: Exploring novel ways to visualise complex bodies of data (seen from multiple perspectives) in order to produce serendipitous encounters that lead to critical insights
- Complex narrative facilitation: Enabling group sensemaking for descriptive self-awareness, consideration of multiple perspectives, and questioning of unexamined assumptions
- Complex system decision support: Building frameworks and tools that help people make sense of complex and ordered elements of situations for group decision support
- Open-ended modeling: Helping analysts build multi-purpose models for group decision support that can be used to communicate complex understandings and detect emerging patterns in incoming data
- Landscape modeling: Helping people build and visualise "fitness landscape" diagrams of complex situations out of descriptions of experiences (stories), building a terrain for sensemaking and decision support in complex situations
- Community network analysis: Deriving new forms of Social Network Analysis that use narratives rather than direct questions and work with characteristics rather than individuals to create insights about communities which direct questioning about real people cannot reveal
- Crowd wisdom: Harnessing the "wisdom of crowds" to produce results for collective brainstorming, but with the addition of narrative elements and modifications to avoid common traps of such systems
- Network simulation for decision support: Coming up with new ways of simulating social networks for perspective change and sensemaking which avoid the problems of atomistic reductionism by using narrative as an indirect means of disclosure and by connecting characteristics rather than individuals using a Blau space approach
- Network identity mapping: Combining the use of Galois lattices and narrative inquiry about groups and individuals in order to explore complex topics in social networks