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Announcing the PNI Practicum
Hello everyone. People have been asking me to give a course in Participatory Narrative Inquiry for ages. Well: I’m finally doing it. Some may remember that I started playing with the idea of giving PNI courses way back in 2015. I’ve been encouraged by many of the people I’ve talked to about it, so I… Read more
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Mail bag: How many stories?
Last week somebody asked me a question via email that I’ve already answered lots of times: How many stories should a PNI project collect? I was about to say “it’s on page whatever in my book,” like I usually do, but then I thought — why don’t I write something new this time, just to… Read more
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Narratopia is an open source game
Two blog posts back, I said I was going to work on Narratopia again. I said I planned to work on two tasks: (1) trim the print-on-demand version of the game to make it cheaper, and (2) make the game easier to translate. I did try. For weeks. But both of the tasks turned out… Read more
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The Confluence Workbook, among other things
Readers, I have several things to tell you about: a workbook, a podcast, a FAQ, sales, plans, and reviews. The Confluence Workbook As I worked on Confluence over the past two years, thinking my way through the examples you see in the book (and many other examples that didn’t make it into the book), I… Read more
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We Are Now Leaving NarraFirma (for a while)
As you may know, my husband and I started working together on NarraFirma, our open-source software for participatory narrative inquiry, in 2014. We put out our first release in October of 2015. Since then I have tried to work on the software for at least a month every year. All in all, I would estimate… Read more
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NarraFirma 1.5.0 is out
All righty then. I’ve been working on the latest pulse of NarraFirma development for about two months, and I’ve got some things to show you. I’ll just show you a few of my favorite changes here. For more detail (than you could ever want), visit the NarraFirma blog. Better surveys The surveying part of NarraFirma… Read more
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A New Journey to NarraFirma
Hello everybody. After nearly two years, it’s finally time to go back to work on NarraFirma. I am now beginning a new development pulse. Hooray! In fact, I have already released a new minor version. You can read about the changes in version 1.4.2 in the narrafirma.com blog post announcing the release. Now here’s my… Read more
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Confluence: The Book
It’s done. The new book is ready for you to read. It has an Amazon page with print and Kindle versions, plus a web site (at cfkurtz.com/confluence) with downloadable excerpts and exercise materials. You should also be able to order the book at your local book store (ISBN: 978-0-9913694-1-6). Confluence is about the ways in… Read more
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Introducing the Participatory Narrative Practitioner Network
Today I want to talk to you about the PNI Institute, its history, its ending, and its successor. (Book update: I am still working on the last chapter. It is shaping up well, though more slowly than expected. I hope to be ready to send the book to my early readers in the next 3-4… Read more
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Questions for you, questions for me
Two posts in a row! Hooray! To be honest, I miss writing in the blog. It was fun. I’ll see if I can start doing it at least once a month again. However, I will need to hold myself back from writing those long essays that took up weeks of my time. Must not get… Read more
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What I have been up to
Hello people. It has been increasingly bothering me that my last blog post was over a year ago. I wonder if people might think I have vanished off the face of the earth! Not yet. I have been working on a book. I have been working on it harder and more exclusively than I usually… Read more
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Even more NarraFirma
I have just finished another NarraFirma release, again based on commissions, with more new features. Chiefly this: I am calling it a “correlation map.” It shows relationships among all the scale questions in your project in one graph. When you hover over a link you can see the scatterplot of combined values (as in this… Read more
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NarraFirma keeps getting better
Last month I received some more development commissions to improve NarraFirma, so I have been working on it again, and I released a new version today. The focus of this release has been on improving the flexibility and usability of the catalysis process. You can review the full list of changes at the NarraFirma blog.… Read more
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Mail bag: Stepping stones
Hello readers. I have been very busy in the past few months with paying projects. This has been a wonderful thing for my prospects of continuing to do this work! But it has led to the neglect of this blog, and of the book project. I have a few partially written blog posts in development,… Read more
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More Better NarraFirma
NarraFirma has been getting some attention lately. I received development commissions from several NarraFirma users, so I’ve been working on the software since early November, and I’ve bundled together all the things people wanted into a new version, 1.2.0. The blog post on the NarraFirma web site goes into great detail about all the new… Read more
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A little bit of history repeating
This blog post has been moved to (and revised for) The Working with Stories Miscellany. You can find it in Chapter 19. Read more
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Writing here and there
Lately I’ve been writing less here because I’ve been writing more there. On the PNI Institute blog, that is. So right now, if you want to read the new stuff I’m writing, go there. Why am I writing more there? This year, in our monthly Zoom calls, we’ve been going through the purposes of participatory… Read more
Story-Colored Glasses
A blog about organizational and community narrative