Annotation Guidelines For narrative levels, time features, and subjective narration styles in fiction (SANTA 2)

Abstract

These guidelines comprise instructions for the usage of a series of markup tags that describe narrative characteristics of fiction. These tags are used to mark disruptions in narration, in the form of narrative level changes, temporal jumps, and instances of subjective narration. The tags are designed to be used in XML, as is the case in the examples in these guidelines, but they can beadaptedforotherplatformslikeCATMA.Therearesixtags: (foranarrativelevelchange, anoccurrenceofastory within a story), (a flashback), (a flash forward in story time), (stream of consciousness), and (free indirect discourse). The guidelines first describe the narrative concepts represented by each of the tags, with reference to Genette and other narratologists. There follows some detail on how the tags should be used specifically in the encoding of texts, with examples taken from a corpus of modernist fiction. Essentially, the tags should be applied at the points inthetextwheretherelevantinstanceofnarrativedisruptionbeginsandends. Thisallowsthemtheencodedtexttobeanalysed afterwards to count the frequency of the tags, and the number of words contained within a tag. In this way, the usage of the tags serves as a method for quantifying the extent of narrative disruption in works of fiction.