"I, Robo-Writer”: Imaginaries of Narrative in the Age of Data Storytelling

While it is too early to speak of a “narrative turn” in Big Data, recent developments in automated storytelling technologies have contributed to renew the rhetoric of fears and promises in this domain. In January 2015, an announcement made by Associated Press that corporate earnings stories will be automated raised concerns that journalism could be the next “disappearing job”. A year later, Qlik, a software company within the field of Business Intelligence management, partnered with Narrative Science, a disruptive company that uses “advanced natural language platform” to generate stories “hidden” in the data, rendering manual analysis almost obsolete. Interestingly, algorithm and storytelling play an equal part in these sociotechnical imaginaries – narratives are even described as full-fledged technologies per se, with a sensemaking potential only enhanced by automation. It is reasonable to think that these advances would not have been possible without the amount of knowledge about storytelling slowly built up in the humanities, especially in a domain such as narratology, which considered stories as formal, combinatory structures long before software tools could identify and recode their basic grammatical components. In this paper, we propose to reverse the premises of the relation between narrative and technology, by exploring the imaginaries of storytelling as a technology revived by technology. On the one hand, the rediscovery of storytelling by knowledge management is in line with an established trend in using stories as a means of influence in non-literary areas such as advertising, public relations or human resources. But on the other hand, as literature always paid attention to technological evolution, it has much in common with historical (cut-up, constrained writing) as well as more recent literary possibilities offered by automation.