The Moving Lens: Coherence Across Heterogeneous contexts in narrative and biology

Abstract

Narrative can be considered a distributed system of intelligence: a sprawling network of inferences that connect diverse contexts, perspectives and forms of information. To synthesize these into a coherent fabric, a story employs mechanisms that are usually invisible to a reader. The result is a combined ‘interpretive frame’ that is accessible to all informational components, yet also changes as the story unfolds. This research tracks key operations of that process using a diagrammatic modeling grammar, using the example of the story Red Riding Hood as a Dictator Would Tell It. One goal is to model elusive qualities of narrative information such as ambiguity, tentative states, causal anticipation and managing unknowns, in a manner that can support reasoning systems. A current application is ontological interaction between models of biological processes in the body. This work focuses on the dynamics of a natural collaborative society, and is applicable in understanding how ‘team narratives’ evolve in an unfolding performance.