Why We Don't Need to Break Stories to Analyze Them

By: Moozhan Shakeri

Stories Are Everywhere (And That's the Problem)

Stories are humanity's most natural form of communication. Every day, billions of people share their experiences through social media, videos, audio recordings, and text, creating an unprecedented wealth of insight, knowledge, and lived experience.

The Current Approach: Break It to Study It

Yet, when researchers need data, they need to impose structure upfront. Surveys demand specific answers in specific orders. Forms require predetermined categories. Data collection tools force storytelling experiences into rigid frameworks.

This approach has consequences:

It limits expression. People can't tell their stories naturally, they must fit into checkboxes and predetermined fields.

It restricts mediums. Rich media like video, audio, and free-form text are often discarded because they're "too messy" to analyze systematically.

It costs resources. Creating structured data collection instruments, recruiting participants, and processing responses demands significant time and funding.

It breaks the flow. The natural storytelling arc, how one event leads to another, how places evoke emotions, how experiences unfold over time, gets fragmented into discrete data points.

Spatial data collection exemplifies these limitations. To study how people move through cities, researchers create travel diaries with rigid time slots and predefined location categories. The richness of why someone went somewhere, how they felt, who they were with, the narrative context that makes movement meaningful, gets lost.

The Insight: Structure Exists Within Stories

But what if we've been thinking about this backwards?

Structure doesn't need to be imposed. It's already there.

Literature, one of humanity's oldest and most sophisticated forms of communication, is deeply structured. Stories have plots, characters, settings, temporal sequences, and causal relationships. These elements aren't random; they're the architecture that makes narratives comprehensible and meaningful.

The Opportunity: Extract and Design, Don't Impose

New technologies, particularly advances in natural language processing, computer vision, and audio analysis, allow us to recognize and extract structure from natural storytelling. We can:

Identify not just locations, but routes mentioned in text or audio without requiring GPS coordinates.
Understand temporal sequences without time-stamped entries.
Recognize activities and experiences in their time and place of happening.
Connect narrative elements to real-world data, linking a mentioned street to demographic information, a described experience to weather patterns, a journey to transportation infrastructure

This isn't about replacing human interpretation with automation. It's about respecting the natural form of human expression while making it analytically tractable.

What This Unlocks

When we stop breaking stories to analyze them, we unlock:

Richer data. Multi-media, natural narratives contain nuance that structured forms can't capture.
Lower barriers. People can share experiences through the mediums they're already using, voice notes, videos, casual writing, rather than learning new data collection tools.
Cross-disciplinary insights. A single story about a daily commute might inform mobility research, mental health studies, urban planning, and economic analysis simultaneously.
Authentic voices. Communities can share their experiences without researchers predefining what matters.

PlotPoints: Structure Recognition, Not Structure Imposition

This is why we built PlotPoints.

We believe the future of narrative research isn't about creating better forms, it's about understanding the forms that already exist within stories. By recognizing narrative structure across text, audio, and video, and linking it to real-world data, we can honor how people naturally communicate while enabling systematic analysis.

The structure is already there. We just need to learn how to see it and work with it.