 Hello, I'm Hans Christoph Vogel, I'm Professor for Library Information Science. I have worked on the development of fictional prose in the 17th and 18th century and I will try to give you some insight to this. Storytelling in Temeli, you have those cubes, story cubes. You see, it is not normal, it dies with numbers, but with pictures. And you can take those cubes with you and you throw them on the table and let your partner begin with a story. You have to tell a tiny bit of a story about this picture. So what do you tell? What do you say now? What is happening with your feet when you were in the holidays and you were marching on the beach and then finally, yeah, perhaps you found some interesting animal and this animal was biting your feet or something like this. And then you found an apple and this apple could be used to help your bleeding feet or so. I don't know if it is really a story. So you have to combine those dice and you have your story when you have combined all the dices finally. This is one of the possible rules. But you can say also this dice is your turn, the next dice is the turn of someone else in the round and the next one has to continue your story. So there's sort of collaborative story. And yeah, for the next round you find a new story. After the beach party you go away with the plane or you find another country. Some game, not dice, but yeah, the story of the playing cards. And one of the stories I combine with playing cards is that when the French Revolution found the playing cards in the aristocratic houses, they had no sense with it. And they made out of playing cards the first library cards because on the same time they throw out the books from the aristocratic houses. So this is my story too. These are sort of the particular discovery stories of playing cards. As we all know, humans are interwoven in stories. Even every human object belongs to a story. So if you see a dice like this, you know where it comes from and what it is and what you have done with it and so on. And the production of it has also sort of a story, a history at least. And finally one can say that humans only differentiate between the meaning of things and the time-related embedding of the things. So there the story comes from. The phenomenologists say that humans have two sorts of thinking, which is one is the paradigm thinking and the other is a narrative sense making. So only those two general perspectives we have. And finally we can say that stories enable identities. Identities as a person, an individual, or for the communities. So if you don't have a story, you don't have your biography and you don't have your identity as an organization or even nation. But stories are mainly oral. They belong to orality and they have mainly this characteristic that they are told between people directly. And with the advent of writing, things change. When we have literacy, we can talk also about orality in a narrower sense. Writing is seen as a liberation of memory, but also as Plato says it could be a destruction of memory or loss of memory. And with the advent of mass media, even social media, we might have another level of orality and that I think we are talking about in this MOOC. The discovery of the concept of implicit knowledge versus explicit knowledge, which is combined to Michael Polanji, who talked about tacit knowledge of humans, leads to a rediscovery of the person as a medium for the transfer of knowledge in a group or in an organization. So in recent time with knowledge management, we are talking again about storytelling and stories as a medium for knowledge and even wisdom. I called it once in a text the wisdom of the text. And we are now seeing a sort of a turn that storytelling is more and more seen as an instrument for knowledge management, for oral history, for instance in archival science and was the concept of the living libraries, that is the talking books, persons as books you find in libraries. That's why we are sitting here in the library because some people in the library science say that libraries are houses of stories. So when you see the stacks you see a lot of stories, paradigmatic stories, but also narrative sense-making stories. So that's a bit the general overview of what I'm talking about. What is the characteristics of oral narrative? Let's start with the oral narrative. Normally they don't have a real plot. That sounds a bit astonishing, but normally they don't have a tension line. They don't have a climax and then a happy end. That is not the main characteristic of oral traditional, very old narrative and storytelling. They don't have the peripetia and they don't have a happy or tragic ending normally. They are mostly serial and can be told in portions. I will come to some examples later. Oral storytelling needs dramatization and have some mnemonic memory elements like rhythm, rhymes and dramatization also means that the audience is involved in the talking. So the early talking, telling of stories of fairy tales, for instance in Brittany, they discovered that the audience knew at what time they had to, for instance, to clap their hands at the beginning. Like we say in Germany, Zeytia Aledda was a Gospel theatre in the Celtic area. At the beginning they had to clap their hands. At the end there are several other reads. The audience has to fulfill, so to say that the story has an end. As we say it in English, end they lived happily ever after. The audience joins this and they lived happily ever after. The listeners are involved directly. That is the main characteristic of very early storytelling. At the beginning there is no real distinction between history and story. For instance Herodot or Homer, they both talk about gods, they both talk about the origins of the Greek society and they give the identity to this cultural family. So you can't really differentiate between those. And if you look at the story itself, for instance the Odyssey, it doesn't have in itself climax and intention line. There are several stories combined together and you can tell, you can sing the Odyssey at different portions. You can start in the middle, you can start there and the audience knows it. Finally when literacy comes, so when writing comes, we can begin to differentiate those two genres. So with Platon and Aristoteles, the first poetic theories come into being and they first draw the line between history and fiction. So that is sort of the beginning. So yeah, we know some of the big narratives in our western world, but in nearly every culture you find something. There are some of the very big stories of the culture, the identity of the culture. Like for instance in Germany we have the song of the Nibelung. And already with the title of this epic, you'll see that it is sung. It is a chanson if you want to, they have to sing it. It is only late in the medieval ages with the advent of big scriptoria and monasteries. And finally with the invention of the print that the mnemonic structures of fictional texts are lost. So you see it also when you come from the manuscripts to the printing. The first printing, you can't decide if it is a manuscript or printing because they imitate the print, they are the manuscripts. So it is the same coming from orality to literacy or fictionality. You still have these characteristics and elements of the oral diction, the oral situation of reception. The singing for instance. So it is rather late, for instance in the Renaissance in the western world, we see the coming of some other kind of stories. The first stories we can see in our perspective of our storytelling, it is for instance Boccaccio's Diocamavone. And there you still see the serial characteristic of the storytelling. You see there are 100 stories told by some group of people and something happening with the audience also. But it is 14th century for instance. And only at the beginning of the 17th century we find the first novels in our sense. For instance this one here, you see it, Don Quixote. It is one of many historians or many historians of literature say it is one of the first novels in our culture. And if you look at it, it is still similar to the old culture, the old serial telling, the old interconnected stories, small parts of stories. And at the beginning of the 18th century we find the first translation of the Arabian Nights, 1001 Nights, you know, which you have, there you have still this serial part of telling and finally you even have this ironic disruption that story telling saves life. I don't know if you remember the story of the Arabian Nights. And this is in the 18th century that we can begin to think about fiction at a different level as it has been done by Aristotle and Plato. And there we, mainly in the 18th century in the beginning of the Enlightenment, we see that we have a fictional prose which is not oral anymore, which needs the book. So the fictional prose, the fictional storytelling begins to be combined to the individual, the person. You see pictures of aristocratic ladies very in their car, reading a book, reading a story, reading some fictional prose. So it is really beginning to be a matter of individual personality. And you see, when you say that the fictional prose has its start as renaissance, you see, even in the Enlightenment and the 18th century you see it is more combined to the renaissance of the person and the individual and the possibilities to say I. So in fact it has a democratic tendency and that's why we sometimes can combine novels with the Enlightenment and further on with the French Revolution for instance. Without these new media like fictional prose the novels, we wouldn't have French Revolution because the wisdom and the knowledge which is integrated in the text can be distributed in a more individualistic way so that people like these aristocratic ladies or more the bourgeois ladies can learn about the new values of the Enlightenment. This is something that Roland Barthes was talking about, the Pleasure of the New Text, that in the text there is something happening, not only the storyline but there is sort of, yeah, transfer of knowledge finally. After the French Revolution we still have the novel and the novel is of course widespread in the 19th century. We see the advent of mechanical industrial printing press, the distribution of new media in a very large form. So all these new technologies of mass production and we can see it in a very general way today we see other new technologies of mass production, it's not only printing press. So this mass production of texts and stories together with spreading literacy and widely reachable reception in a very general way. Reception technology is like radio for instance in the 20th century. These, let us see, change mainly in terms of quantity of the audience. And in the very strict sense here we find really mass media have a democratizing effect. More stories can be received or nowadays even produced by more people. That is the story in itself is not only anymore the main story, the big history, the big story of people or the big story in the autobiographical sense of one person but several stories, very, very broad concept of stories begin to appear in the 19th century. That is a bit what Chris Anderson describes as the long tail in the Web 2.0, 2.0. And we can see the long tail already in the 19th century when printing and the mass production technologies of texts appear. But in fact it's concerned fictional production already in the 19th century. So it's not only the Web 2.0. We see in the 19th century that hegemonial power try to delimit this democratizing effect of stories finally. For instance by canalizing the mass production by measures of censorship or the strict controls of libraries for instance. And we see for instance the prescription of the novels in the very general sense in the 19th century. At least sometimes they have, they are inventing libraries for the education of the poor people so they have to canalize the stories and to choose the stories the poor people can read. As new forms of reality arise more personal stories can be distributed and heard. With a paperback for instance also the distribution of very different kinds of stories begin. And technology and digitalization gives us now the possibility to even share more stories of our lives as does Facebook because it's an element called in German Kronig. So you see your own life in the Facebook pages and you're telling your life with a new technology. And you tell perhaps some stories as I said in the beginning you tell stories of your objects you discover and you show your pictures what you're doing and you tell your stories. You are interwoven in those stories. In the 20th century finally we see that the story like the mimesis in the arts is sort of destroyed. Think of the novelists of the so-called Nouveau-Rouement. They are filling books and books with the description of one second or one minute. So very very story less sort of novels. This only changed in the last decennies of the 20th century with some Nouveau-Nouveau-Rouement. For instance the Jean-Philippe Toussaint-La-Saëlle-de-Bain was one of the first who rediscovered the stories. Still sitting in his bath for a long time and nothing happens really but the beginning of the story. And we find some other new representatives of new stories like Michel Wielbic who is telling a story but in a quite different differentiated way. So in philosophy under the impression of the phenomenologists like Husserl and Merleau-Quanté the ontological foundation of humans by stories begin to be recognized only in the 1950s. So we see that at the second half of the 20th century we have a new understanding of stories as being integrated in the human personality. And it is only during the 70s that we experience a turn, a general turn, like several other turns we experience in social sciences for instance. In history we experience the turn in historiography or the methodology of history and there we discover oral history that is interviewing contemporary witnesses, Zeitzeug, as they're called in German, as a new form of historiography. So we find here the rediscovery of the history in the storytelling and we find what they call the narrative psychology in other disciplines. Like in management we rediscover storytelling for knowledge management. And in information science, me being information scientist, information science begins to be interested in the method and the concepts of storytelling in distinguishing explicit information and implicit knowledge. This only happens in the 90s finally. So you see the story of storytelling at this point. And together with historiography the archival science which belongs to the information sciences is now interested in documenting oral history in stories. So we're videotaping the last survivors of the Auschwitz and so on. And in library science as I said before and in library management we are now talking of libraries as house of stories and develop the idea of living libraries with humans as talking books. Meet your living book and talk and hear his or her story. Okay, thank you.