Hierarchically

The most straightforward approach to structuring your narratives is to arrange them in a hierarchy, commencing with an umbrella narrative and cascading down through logical groupings.

If we consider our example narratives, several ways to arrange them in a hierarchy may be apparent, but for the sake of illustration we structure them as follows:

Example hierarchy

In the Narratives module we establish these relationships on the Associations tab using the Related Narratives fields.

One of the beauties of this approach is that it is possible to view the full tree-like structure of narratives on the Hierarchy tab for any record included in the hierarchy. We'll look at this in the following pages.

Note that in the illustration the Narrative Type has been indicated for each record. For this collection, four Types in a simple hierarchy are deemed to be sufficient to categorise the narratives:

  • Master
  • Theme
  • Category
  • Story

Something to note is that the Type is not necessarily tied to a particular level in the hierarchy and, in fact, the hierarchy of narratives is not constrained by the hierarchy of Types.

Consider that we have four Types, but there are in fact five levels to the hierarchy of narratives.

In this example the Category type defines a broad grouping of narratives (although less broad than Theme). As can be seen the P.K. Dick narrative (which is a Category) points down to two more Category narratives: in other words, a Master narrative with a Type of Category (for example) does not need to point down to narratives with a Type of Story - it can clearly point to another Category, which in turn could point to further Category narratives.

In short, there could be as many levels as make sense for your collection.

Next steps