Research Guides: LING 429/529: Discourse Pragmatics in Storytelling: Home

Narratives Collected for Entertainment

Snap Judgement (WNYC public radio)
Dramatic tales, killer beats and the edgiest new talent in storytelling come together for a weekly radio hour.
Story Collider
Founded in 2010 by two physicists who met at a storytelling show in Queens and have been bringing true, personal stories about science to life.
The Moth
Since 1997 The Moth has presented thousands of stories told live and without notes. Moth shows are renowned for the great range of human experience they showcase. Each show starts with a theme, and the storytellers explore it, often in unexpected ways. Since each story is true and every voice authentic, the shows dance between documentary and theater, creating a unique, intimate, and often enlightening experience for the audience.
Porchlight, A Storytelling Series
Listen to the Porchlight podcasts (link above) or visit their website for more info. Porchlight is San Francisco's premier storytelling series. Each month, the founders invite six people to tell ten-minute true stories without using notes or memorization. Past storytellers include some of the area's most entertaining school bus drivers, mushroom hunters, politicians, socialites, sex workers, musicians, authors, systems analysts, and social workers.
Risk! True Tales, Boldly Told
“Where people tell true stories they never thought they’d dare to share in public." The award-winning live show happens monthly in New York and Los Angeles.
StoryCorps
StoryCorps’ mission is to preserve and share humanity’s stories in order to build connections between people and create a more just and compassionate world.

Narratives Collected for Research

Saarbrucken Corpus of Spoken English
Frog Story Corpora This page provides an index to the Frog Story narrative data. Researchers in many countries have used Mercer Mayer’s wordless “frog story” picture book entitled “Frog, where are you?” as a tool for eliciting narrative descriptions. The book tells a story without words in 24 pictures. The principal source for documentation of this work, its rationale, and the various data analysis procedures is the book by Berman and Slobin (1994). Because that book provides such complete documentation for this project, the current documentation will only cover the general issues in the research. Researchers can also consult that book for a complete listing of research in additional languages and with second-language learners using the Frog Story framework.
Chinese and English Pear Stories In the mid-1970's Professor Wallace Chafe decided to test how much a simple story will vary from language to language. With his research team, he designed a very simple film to elicit stories from speakers around the world, including uneducated speakers in rural areas. (For full description, see Chafe 1980.) 'The Pear Stories' film was designed to tap into universal experiences, by showing a man harvesting pears, which are stolen by a boy on a bike. The boy has some other adventures with other children, before the farmer discovers that his pears are missing. The film is six minutes long, in color, with sound effects but no words.
New Mexico Farm and Ranch Museum Oral History Project The Museum Oral History Program makes abstract outlines of all our completed interviews available through this web site—thus further sharing New Mexico's farming, ranching, and rural heritage with the rest of the world.
UNM CSWR American Indian Oral History Recordings These interviews document oral traditions and recollections of Native Americans mostly in New Mexico and Arizona. Commonly called the Doris Duke Project, they were recorded, 1967-1972, by graduate students from the University of New Mexico. The bulk of the collection consists of interviews with Navajos and New Mexico Pueblo Indians talking about personal and family histories. It includes information on social culture, education, ceremonies, legends, language, government and history. Historical subjects reported from a Native American perspective include the Pueblo Revolt, brief tribal histories, traditional hunting practices and public works programs. Some interviews also contain commentaries on the 1968 Indian Civil Rights Act, the Red Power movement and the occupation of Alcatraz.