How might we understand our lives as a social network? How do we interlink some stories and not others? In the way that we interlink our stories, what does it tell us about our creative capacities and process of making meaning? How do the relationships we have embedded ourselves within shape the stories we live?
These questions are based on the premise that our identities are constituted through the process of interlinking textual narratives (i.e. stories) within our lives. These stories can be from our family, social, historical, political, religious, and/or cultural etc lives. Each of these spaces contains multiple stories, and in the process of making meaning, we link to the selected stories thus weaving what I call hyperlinked identities. This weave generates our unique fabric of identity which is fluid, emergent, multiple, contextualizing and contextualized (situated).
The process of interlinking narratives is the process of making meaning. And it is the process of one’s creativity. These interlinks happen within a social context. To understand how one interlinks, is a way to understand one’s creative process and how we tend to constitute one’s life value.
Methodology: I will be exploring how to use social network analysis for this project. So, if you are interested in exploring SNA for this, please join me. We will be using our personal stories to learn how to do SNA. SNA is a study of entities in relation to each other within a network. So if we assumed the person’s story as an entity, then all of their stories, in relationship to each other, form a network. This is easier to study if we looked at interrelated stories among family members, where each individual family member would represent an entity. Thus, I’m in the process of deciding, by learning about SNA, if I will go with a network of people in a person’s like (easier to imagine) or choose a network of stories within a person’s life (harder to quantify).
Phases of Inquiry:
- Explore SNA
- Refine my curiosity & purpose
- Develop research questions
- Design methodology
- Conduct inquiry
- Share!
