Collections of children's fictional narratives ('told' stories)

Mon Mar 24 17:58:10 UTC 2014

Dear Gordon,

      CHILDES really should include more narrative corpora.  The emphasis on spoken language made sense at one point, but it should not have precluded efforts to include narrative corpora. Currently, we have Frog Story data and a few other things.  But there are certainly dozens of other corpora out there.  It would be particularly interesting to have narratives that are collected using parallel methods across groups, as well as methods for systematic coding, including automatic coding.  In fact, I was even thinking of organizing something like a CHILDES workshop to tackle this issue.  
     In terms of the issue of stripping out linguistic annotation, this is easy to do automatically using two methods.  The first method is to remove any coding tiers with the TRIM program in CLAN and the second is to create a %flo line that removes any main line codes using the FLO program.  
     In practice, the codes that people add to children's written narratives are of a very different sort, often focusing on misspellings or corrections of grammatical errors and such.  I agree that it would be nice to have methods of removing such embelllishments for certain purposes and leaving them for others.  Creating these methods is not difficult once we establish some standards for narrative corpus encoding.
     In general, we really need to do more regarding narratives in CHILDES and we would very much welcome contributions, suggestions, and ideas.
     In regard to data from children with autism, one would think that IRBs would not object to contributing anonymized narratives.  So, it may make sense to contact the many groups who have been collecting data of this type to see if they can be made public in some way.
     The essays on the artandwriting.org site are certainly great, but I think we would need broader samples to understand the full course of the development of narrative abilities across all segments of the population. 

So, the things that would help in this area are:
1.  Contributions of narrative corpora.
2.  Pointers to methods for systematic analysis.
3.  Ideas for how to prioritize efforts in this area.

Any input on these matters would be much appreciated.  People who find this interesting can post to the list and/or send me information directly.

Best regards,

--Brian MacWhinney

On Mar 24, 2014, at 10:31 AM, Gordon Ingram <gordoning at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi everyone,
> 
> Some colleagues and I are hoping to start a project in the nearish future which will involve the collection of children's original (fictional) narratives as part of the requirements-gathering process for a piece of software aimed at helping children improve their creative writing skills. I plan to share any resulting corpus with the scientific community.
> 
> Does anyone know of a collection of original fictional narratives - i.e., not 'retold' fairytales and the like - which is easily available on the internet, for us to do a pilot study on? I am vaguely aware of Ruth Berman and Dan Slobin's 'frog stories', some of which I think are available in CHILDES, and will have a look at them; but ideally I would like something a bit more accessible (i.e. without all the linguistic annotation, as we will probably need to strip that out in order to have it analysed by AI) - and perhaps something written by kids rather than spoken.
> 
> Age range would be about 6-12 - though we could go older if necessary. Something on autistic children's production of fictional narratives would also be really useful; doesn't have to be a corpus in this case, even an article or two would help.
> 
> Best regards,
> Gordon
> -- 
> Dr Gordon Ingram
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