Storytelling as a practice in youth services librarianship emerged in the 1890s, when libraries began offering “a regular hour for storytelling” (Dousman, 1896). Storytelling is addressed first to emphasize that a specific instance of a story only exists because of the storytelling triangle. Definitions of storytelling and story are articulated below in order to describe the relationships of these terms to fundamental definitions of information. Stories and storytelling that communicate information (and data, knowledge, and wisdom, discussed below) are widespread and not accounted for adequately by current understandings of information. Storytelling is explored 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 to support future IS storytelling research. Storytelling research can engage persistent challenges in understanding information processes. Storytelling communicates to and with collective, social, and interpretive audiences. Story is both an empirical form and a socially constructed narrative experience. This article proposes a paradigm shift toward story as a fundamental information form and storytelling as a way of understanding collective meaning-making. Missing is a framework for understanding collective information processes and collective meaning-making. Most IS definitions of information presume individual meaning-making, a limit which poses increasing challenges to understanding, for example, online information behavior. However, this and related research has focused predominately on the individual. Human-centered perspectives in both LIS and IS that draw on social constructionism have influenced information behavior research, for example Dervin and Kuhlthau who explained human search and sense-making experiences, respectively (Dervin, 1998 Kuhlthau, 1991).
Its “focus on the creative nature of knowledge and information” and the “construction metaphor” allows researchers to study things “which do not have material substance,” such as stories (Berger & Luckmann, 1966 Leeds-Hurwitz, 2012). The interdisciplinary term “social constructionism” here refers to understanding reality as socially constructed, rooted in American pragmatism and symbolic interactionism. Indeed, social constructionism is implicit in much human-centered research within information studies (Holland, 2006).
And yet social complexities are foundational to research on information behavior, as evidenced by ongoing efforts to investigate “fake news” (Cooke, 2017) and the COVID-19 infodemic (Zarocostas, 2020). Attempts to rectify seemingly disparate definitions of “information” as a foundational term reveal an empiricist epistemology IS bedrock that typically excludes social complexities such as “opinions, intentions, desires,” and “cultural forms and social practices” (Ma, 2012). Story conveys information, implies storytelling as communication dynamic, bridges empirical and social epistemologies, and centers collective audience interpretations. These concepts open new vistas for IS research on information as simultaneously empirical and socially constructed. Storytelling is a fundamental process of collective meaning-making, and story should be considered a fundamental information form. This article defines story and storytelling, and revises an information framework-the data, information, knowledge, wisdom framework (DIKW)-in order to demonstrate how story and storytelling should provoke a conceptual paradigm shift. After more than a century of practice, LIS storytelling has been largely overlooked by IS and “neglected as a source for new ways of thinking and knowing” (McDowell, 2020). Storytelling, which has a long tradition in library and information science (LIS) and a longer tradition in sacred texts, folklore, and related wisdom traditions, has yet to inform the information sciences (IS) beyond qualitative data collection methods (such as oral history).
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