On Monday during the DRW orientation, I’m going to be presenting a workshop on tools for investigating narrative arguments. One of the tools I’ve been playing with is Dipity, a website for making timelines that can be shared with other users. Because timelines force a narrative into a strictly chronological arrangement, they can be interesting tools for helping students to see how narrative arguments can be manipulated for the best effects. In conjunction with the use of Michael Lewis’s The Blind Side as this year’s First Year Forum text, I have taken a section of the book—from the end of chapter 10 to the beginning of chapter 12—and created a Dipity timeline based on an outline of the events described in this section.

One interesting result of this exercise is that it makes it easier for students to see how Lewis has rearranged the events he describes so as to achieve particular effects. The most prominent of these effects is suspense, as Lewis introduces a violent episode in the life of his protagonist, Michael Oher, but doesn’t provide the resolution of this event until after resolving another mystery he as set up in the book: where Michael, or Mike, a 6' 5", 300+ pound teenager who was found living on the streets of one of Memphis’s worst housing projects, came from. In bringing these stories together, Lewis has not only used their arrangement to provide interest in and catharsis for these stories’ eventual resolution, but also conflated to very different time-scales: Mike’s history from his birth to the age of 16 when he was admitted to Briarcrest Christian School, and the unfortunate events of a single afternoon in Mississippi.

Using a timeline to plot the outline of these events makes their differences more apparent, and can be a helpful tool for students trying to come to grips with narrative arguments. Tools like Dipity can be used to experiment with these timelines, not just for analyzing the texts of others, but also for creating and communicating new narratives related to the goals of a particular class.

Of course, narratives don’t just focus on time. They also concern people, and in some cases places. Charles Cumming’s “The 21 Steps” uses Google Maps’ “My Maps” feature to tell a mystery story. While the particular implementation of story involves more processing than many instructors would like to implement in their classes—the website is presented outside of Google Maps, using embedding features to present the maps in a more individualized design—instructors can use Google Maps to investigate the ways in which certain stories are connected to places. One example of this kind of assignment would be to use My Maps’ social features to see the kind of stories that accumulate around a certain place. Of course, in a small class of 20 or so students, it will be difficult to generate a number of stories so that many areas would be dense with them. However, if an instructor were to limit the area under consideration to a single common area—the UT campus, for example—requiring students to post short stories about their experiences, it might be fruitful to see if certain places lead to certain types of stories, or if different people tell conflicting stories involving the same spaces.

Finally, I will introduce another tool for narrative communication, Twitter. Twitter is a combination blog and SMS client which allows individuals to post short entries that can then be shared with other users, or “followers,” who are interested in them. On the back of this service, some developers have created “Twittories,” a site which allows users to collaborate on stories using Twitter. These stories are limited by Twitter’s affordances—each entry can only be 140 characters long—and the site adds some new requirements of its own. For example, a single user can only add one 140 character post to each Twittory, and each Twittory will end after 140 posts.

Instructors who will have their students create narrative arguments might find the Twittories model to be a useful means of collaboration between students. While composition classes won’t have enough students to allow for a complete Twittory created by 140 unique authors, students could use Twitter itself to create a narrative that could serve as the basis for an argument in another form, such as a major assignment.

Each of these tools presents a unique way of thinking about narrative—its chronology, its connection to place, and its creation by multiple authors. Hopefully one or more to these tools will become useful to you in your course as you explore the creation and use of narrative in argument.