Annotation Guidelines for Narrative Levels and Narrative Acts v2

Abstract

The concept of narrative levels is widely applied in Literary Studies but often based on different theoretical foundations. To operationalise the concept with a reproducible category for a machine learning approach, these guidelines focus on two coredefinitionsofnarrativelevels, namelyGenette’sconceptofanarratorchangeandRyan’sproposalofillocutionaryand ontological boundaries between levels. We separate the notions of “level” and “narrative” into dedicated subcategories for the narrative level , which reflects a vertical dimension, and the narrative act that encompasses horizontally aligned stories. Furthermore, supplementary aspects, like the boundary type between narrative levels or related phenomena like metanarration and metalepsis, are captured as attributes in conjunction with the annotation category to obtain additional knowledge that might be relevant as training data. The guideline is divided into a first part that discusses narratological theory to define the annotation category as well as the attributes and a second part that gives annotation instructions along with textual examples.