This page is an annotated list of useful Internet resources for academic researchers interested in the field of narrative psychology and narrative development in child language. More specifically, it aims to provide online resources such as bibliographic information, online publications or pre-publications, websites of relevant ongoing projects, and database archives available for others' use. The scarcity of relevant documents obtained as a result of various searches conducted on a number of search engines and subject catalogs indicates that printed resources still provide more fruitful routes for academicians approaching the topic of narrative psychology with the intent of further research.

The search engines and subject catalogs that were utilized for acquiring relevant resources were: Alta Vista, HotBot, Excite, Yahoo, Infomine, and The Argus Clearinghouse guide. The search strings that were used consisted of "narrative structure", "narrative psychology", "children and narrative", "storytelling", and some combinations and truncations of these terms.

Given the meager outcomes that these searches provided, all the relevant resources were included in the following list with an accompanying evaluation. As a result, a wide range of documents including general information about the field of narrative psychology and narratology, individual researchers' publications, and database repositories for narrative corpora are cited.

In reviewing the sites that the searches yielded, several criteria were employed in evaluating the quality of the website. First of all, the implied authority and objectivity of the authors were taken into consideration. Secondly, the stated purpose of the creators was considered and reanalyzed with respect to how unintended audiences might benefit from the information provided. In a related vein, the scope of coverage of the information was judged. Another factor that was reviewed was the evidence of regular upkeeping and prospects for expansion of the sites by their respective authors.

Narrative Psychology: An Internet Guide

Prepared by Professor Vincent W. Havern at Le Moyne College, Syracuse, this Internet Guide on Narrative Psychology is the most comprehensive Web document that was encountered in the searches conducted on a number of search engines. The author has a statement of purpose on the first page which says that the guide focuses on "narrative perspectives in psychology, broadly conceived including research methodologies contributing to narrative psychology." The structure of the document is pretty complicated in terms of the number of separate documents it contains and the number of forward and backward hypertext links joining the entire document together. The site hosts a course-related homepage for a proseminar taught by Prof. Havern in addition to a bibliographical resource guide organized as separate links to various lists on diverse topics such as narrative therapy and film, media, and narrative within the common super-topic of narrative psychology. This bibliography would be quite useful to researchers interested in any of these subtopics except probably a query on PsychLit or other relevant databases would provide more recent citations in addition to those provided by this website. In addition, the website provides links to postings of announcements of workshops and conferences which deal with narrative. Although, this guide is inevitably based on the academic preferences and biases of the author, its partially annotated bibliography appears to be inclusive of many citations from a wide spectrum of approaches to narrative- Prof. Havern also invites documents which will have to go through a review process for possible inclusion among the resources. This is probably the best meta-site for academic resources on narrative, and relevant resources could be fruitfuly incorporated within its inclusive structure in the future. Moreover, the site seems to be subject to frequent updating as it contains a what's-new link, in which the most recently acquired or prepared documents are listed. Some of the documents were acquired very recently. Although many of the search engines failed to locate this resource as a relevant one, Yahoo lists under its relevant subject subheading. This is also the only document listed on the subject of "narrative" by The Aldus Clearinghouse, a guide to subject-specific guides on the Internet.

Narratology: ERIC Digest

This summary of what constitutes the field of narratology and the study of story structure was prepared by ERIC, The Educational Resources Information Center. It provides short sections about what is narratology, the functions stories play in human affairs, what structural analysis has revealed about the nature of narratives, children's developing concept of story development, cultural effects on the interpretation and telling of narratives, and the relation of the study of narrative to teaching/learning of the language arts. Although all these blurbs are useful starting points for various components of narratology research, they are way too condensed to provide a comprehensive information resource to advanced researchers. There are useful definitions of some crucial terminology and a short bibliography for beginners at the end of the document.

Narrative Psychology: Kevin Murray

This is the only other document listed by the Yahoo subject guide under the Social Sciences:Psychology:Narrative Psychology heading. It is prepared by an apparent scholar called Kevin Murray in 1995. He does not provide any information about himself and his affiliation other than his publications. At the beginning of the page, Murray basically defines by what he means by a technical term called "narrative partitioning" and lists a few of his publications on the topic of narrative. There is also a link to an essay for which he says he received many mail requests, so he decided to publish most of it online. Such an on-line academic publication is a rarity, and should be encouraged together with the electronic implementation of a peer-review process. However, I am not sure how good an idea it is to post "most" of a publication, which at least lacks the footnotes possibly because of HTML formatting difficulties. The author refers the viewer to the full text in its print version. Although there are good reasons to do parallel web publishing with print, one needs be careful with the type of information that is held back for the print publication version- incomplete pieces might frustrate some readers!

Storytelling In India

This document summarizes some of Lee-Ellen Marvin's (University of Pennsylvania, Department of Folklore and Folklife) pre-dissertation fieldwork conducted in the city of Pune, India. It is one of a series of research pages, of which only one about "Storytelling in India" is ready for viewing at the present. This is a short document which could be prepared as a single file, but the author chose to divide it up to seven subdocuments of introduction, research documents, genres, performance, grandmothers, books, and ages. An introductory sentence ties all these seemingly unrelated link words together and implies why she thought it was important to have separate subdocuments for each of these. She provides her ethnographic impressions about each of these subheadings, some of them being really cryptic. It is not clear why the author has not provided any links to her dissertation proposal which is on the same topic.

Performed Narratives in Gujarati Families: Repetoire, Rhetoric, and Identity. L.E. Marvin's dissertation proposal

This site contains Lee-Ellen Marvin's (University of Pennsylvania, Department of Folklore and Folklife) dissertation proposal submitted in September 1995. There is no evidence that the page has been updated to incorporate the author's progress on the dissertation since it was first created. It seems to serve the dissertation author's interest in wide distribution of her proposal for the purpose of soliciting feedback, although this is not explicitly stated in the webpage. However, her sections of "Introduction", "Related Studies", and "Bibliography" might be found useful as information sources by her intended audience. Overall, since this site does not contain any links to other noteworthy sites on related topics, it comes across as pretty solipsistic.

Story Resources on the Web

This page is a reference page for stories and storytellers prepared for, to use the author's own words, "the afficianados of both storytelling, and the stories told." The author is Sherri Johnson, who was trained as an illustrator or artist, but works as a full-time staff member at the Swarthmore College Computing Center. The website on story resources is also a hotlink on her personal homepage. The categories that the website provides links to are:

• Storytelling Organizations
• Conferences and Festivals
• Tales from other Cultures
• Tales in Other Languages (not English)
• Storytellers
• Audio Stories
• Children's Stories
• Stories By Children
• Familiar Tales
• Individual Stories
• Interactive Stories and HyperFiction
• Collections of Tales
• Other Resources for Storytellers

All of the documents collected over the Internet are meticulously classified into one of these titles and each of the links within these categories are evaluated by the author by a sentence or two. Its scope is quiet broad, and therefore the site might attract a wide spectrum of audiences ranging from fairy tale fanatics to researchers interested in collecting materials on children's stories and cross-cultural tales. There is good evidence that the site is maintained regularly, with new additions accordingly marked. There is also evidence of commitment to continuation since the author solicits comments and suggestions for new links from readers. The page is rated by Magellan as a 3-star site, which indicates that it is viewed as a quite "cool" site by the on-line guide's reviewers.

Book Reviews in TESL-EJ

This is a book review done by James Paul Gee of a major book in the field of narrative development called "Relating events in narrative: A crosslinguistic developmental study" edited by Ruth Berman and Dan Slobin. It resides in one of the issues of Teaching English as a Second or Foreign Language, an electronic journal which is published at the University of California, Berkeley. What is interesting about this document is that it also embodies a response given to the review by Michael Bamberg, one of the collaborating authors in the edited book. This reply-document exists as a separate resource as well, but the interlinking of the two related documents within a single file illustrates some of the advantages of the Web platform with respect to exchanging peer commentary and reviews.

Narrative development in school-aged children

The purpose of the envisioned meta-website that this page is to be part of is to design a group of interactive study modules on various aspects of language development for the usage of teachers and speech-language pathologists. It is prepared by Paula S. Cochran, Ph.D., who teaches courses about language development and using computers with people who have speech problems at the Northeast Missouri State University. Non-normal language development is addressed in addition to typical courses of language acqusition. At this point, only this module on "Developing Narrative Skills" is (partly) implemented. The webpage provides a list of other tentatively planned modules for inclusion in the larger website. The present module includes samples of school-aged children's narratives with examples of linguistic description such as analysis of anaphoric reference, causal connectives, and temporal connectives. There are also examples of children's narratives in written and spoken modes. The example of spoken narrative (formatted in .AIFF) took very long to download and could not be accessed. Despite such inadequacies, this website is a good example of experimentation with various types of documents that could provide beginner information about the field of narrative development in addition to posting case studies that researchers already established in the field could make use of. In brief, it is a promising attempt of linking visual images, sound, and textual transcripts within the framework of a single document. It is not clear how much attention is devoted to the maintenance of the site, but there is an explicitly stated promise of expansion of the content at the end of the webpage.

Narrative and Language Learning Project

This is the webpage of an ongoing project on children's narrative development at Uppsala University, Sweden. Caroline Liberg is the principal investigator, and Lars Espmark is the research assistant. When it is completed, the project will desribe children's narrative activities from a socio-interactionist perspective. Also, it is proposed that the findings will be the basis for future work in the design of computer-aided narrative activities. The researchers also list the specific research questions that they are addressing in addition to sketching their methodologies. The website is a good example of the description of an ongoing research project, which could benefit both the creators and audiences who browse the web for similar studies to their own. One particular weakness about this webpage, though, is that the latest update was done in January, 1995. It is curious why the researchers are not posting any of their preliminary or even definitive results.

CHILDES narrative database

This is a database repository which contains several directories of narrative corpora, contributed to the Child Language Data Exchange System (CHILDES). It is mainly maintained by Brian McWhinney, who is a foremost child language researcher at Carnegie Mellon University, and his colleagues. Individual files or collections of databases can be copied to users' machines using FTP, although the documentation for doing so is not readily available. One has to search through a complex directory structure to reach some "readme" files. This site has been maintained as a ftp site before it became available on the Web, so it does not look like it has been redesigned specifically as a Webpage, which makes it not very easily navigable. With the caveat that the "translation" of the ftp directory structure to a WWW document should be done as soon as possible, the CHILDES narrative database is the single good example of a growing database which contributes and fosters extensive corpus sharing among child language researchers.