Storytelling wisdom: Story, information, and DIKW

Abstract

Most information science (IS) definitions of information center individual rather than collective meaning-making. Because stories are constituted through narrative experience, and audiences are partly constitutive of the stories told to and with them, storytelling offers a framework for researching collective experiences of information. Stories are simultaneously empirical and socially constructed, bridging a key epistemological divide in IS. Storytelling as paradigm shift is explored and demonstrated in three sections that (a) define story and storytelling, (b) describe how story and storytelling can extend the data, information, knowledge, and wisdom (DIKW) pyramid, and (c) revise DIKW as a new storytelling S-DIKW framework. Future IS storytelling research should account for story and the dynamics of storytelling not merely as a subset of information or of information behavior, but as a fundamental information form.