Agneta & Frida - Narrative Intelligence - page 246

aware'; 'this topic wants to teach us something'). Oftentimes there will also be
a critical evaluation of the theme ('yes I understand that this film tries to tell us
that we should seize the day, but I happen to disagree with that philosophy').
With some variation in strength, there is probably emotion and affect
present on all of these levels of coherence. Moral judgment of the character
behavior, for instance, contains a strong element of emotion and is probably
the most fundamental aspect of what we in everyday terms call identification
and sympathy (cf. Smith 1995).
It is important to point out that these inferences and relationships are not
primarily textual phenomena, but mental ones. They are not 'in the text', but
exist rather as readers' constructions during and after the course of the story.
They build up to an experience of holism - the feeling that the text 'keeps to-
gether' and form a more or less tight structure in which things relate to each
other (cf. Trabasso, Suh & Payton 1995). Coherence is, on this account, accom-
plished by the reader through a huge battery of tacit, and hence non-conscious,
everyday assumptions, knowledge and prejudices about the perceptual, physi-
cal and socio-cultural world. Sometimes, the text supplies the reader or specta-
tor with concrete information, but most of the time the text presents nothing
but cues , requiring a huge and well-structured system of background knowl-
edge in order to become meaningful. These processes of 'gap-filling' and sup-
plying the context in which a specific text segment becomes graspable are still
poorly understood (Graesser et al. 1994: 374). They seem to involve biological,
psychologicalaswellassocio-culturalassumptions, making it difficult to main-
tain the separation between textual structures and the activities of the reader /
interpreter (Persson 2003).
The reason why readers construct similar models of coherence is because
they share tacit assumptions. Readers differ in their understanding and inter-
pretation of a given narrative, due to the fact that such assumptions differ. The
amount of relations a reader manages to establish in a given narrative should
also affect the memory of that text. The greater coherence, the better memory.
We wanted to investigate if we could make use of the active construction
processes in the reception of narratives in a situation of web browsing. While
narrative coherence often is quite tight, the experience of web browsing, on
the other hand, is quite fragmented (and not based on characters in the way
narratives are). We wanted to explore the possibility of merging a web browsing
experience with a narrative one.