Network science methodology offers an alternative way of analysing the patterns of relationships, composition and activities of events and actors studied in their own context.
The meaning of the individual and the community in a narrative is conditional on their position in a system of social relationships reported by the author.
Hence, a central problem when dealing with narratives is framing and organising the author's perspective of individual and collective connections to understand better the role of both the witness (viz.
However, the category of narrative network is in its formative, initial phase and as a consequence it is hard to view as a stable and defined notion in linguistics, and beyond sociology.
"[4] The pretension that conceives of history as the representation of the ‘actual’ should be put aside to acknowledge that one can only approach past structures by contrasting them with, or bonding them to, the imaginable world.
Roberto Franzosi,[6] and Bearman and Stovel[7] have offered modelling techniques for narrative networks by focusing on the sequence of events.
The substantive idea that they develop is that the observable narrative structure of life stories can provide insight into the process of identity formation among the witnesses of a delimited scope of time.
These research strategies may have to be diversified to study aspects such as political influence and other non-institutional features of organizations or groups reported by the author through narration.