Interdisciplinary Centre for Narrative Studies
I-NARCS EU COST action
I-NARCS is a network project conceived within the framework of EU COST action funding proposals. It takes up some of the challenges formulated in the Narrating Complexity volume, and maps out a large scale programme of collaborative research and dialogue amongst network participants from ten countries over four years.
The I-NARCS project is led by Jim Bown at Abertay, with CIs Susan Stepney and Richard Walsh at York; it brings together specialists in computer science and complex systems modelling to interact with experts in interactive digital media and narrative theory in order to develop a new, tested framework for interactive exploration of real-world complex systems to inform management.
Our aim is to develop a new framework for designing interactive narratives of complex systems. We will develop each of the NarCS themes (communication, cognition, conceptualization and culture), integrate the themes into a unifying framework, and then test that framework on 3 real-world problems from different complex systems, producing 3 interactive demonstrators built on our ongoing research in cancer systems biology, societal robotics and cities as social systems, to show I-NARCS in action.
I-NARCS draws together existing yet disparate research activity primarily in ICT disciplines but also in narrative theory and contemporary literature, to lay the groundwork for a new research area. We anticipate I-NARCS to lead to both application-specific (e.g. healthcare) and technology-developing (e.g. next generation displays) H2020 proposals.
View the pre-outline proposal flyer here:
NarCS EU COST flyer (PDF 
, 232kb)