Storytelling wisdom: Story, information, and DIKW

Most information science (IS) definitions of information center individual rather than collective meaning‐making. Because stories are constituted through narrative experience, and audiences are partly constitutive of the stories told to and with them, storytelling offers a framework for researching collective experiences of information. Stories are simultaneously empirical and socially constructed, bridging a key epistemological divide in IS. Storytelling as paradigm shift is explored and demonstrated 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. Future IS storytelling research should account for story and the dynamics of storytelling not merely as a subset of information or of information behavior, but as a fundamental information form.


| INTRODUCTION
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). 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). 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. Storytelling is a fundamental process of collective meaning-making, and story should be considered a fundamental information form. These concepts open new vistas for IS research on information as simultaneously empirical and socially constructed.
Story conveys information, implies storytelling as communication dynamic, bridges empirical and social epistemologies, and centers collective audience interpretations. 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). 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). Indeed, social constructionism is implicit in much human-centered research within information studies (Holland, 2006). The interdisciplinary term "social constructionism" here refers to understanding reality as socially constructed, rooted in American pragmatism and symbolic interactionism. 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). 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). However, this and related research has focused predominately on the individual.
Most IS definitions of information presume individual meaning-making, a limit which poses increasing challenges to understanding, for example, online information behavior. Missing is a framework for understanding collective information processes and collective meaningmaking. This article proposes a paradigm shift toward story as a fundamental information form and storytelling as a way of understanding collective meaning-making. Story is both an empirical form and a socially constructed narrative experience. Storytelling communicates to and with collective, social, and interpretive audiences. Storytelling research can engage persistent challenges in understanding information processes. 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.

| DEFINITIONS
Stories can inform. 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. Definitions of storytelling and story are articulated below in order to describe the relationships of these terms to fundamental definitions of information. Storytelling is addressed first to emphasize that a specific instance of a story only exists because of the storytelling triangle.

| Defining storytelling
Storytelling as a practice in youth services librarianship emerged in the 1890s, when libraries began offering "a regular hour for storytelling" (Dousman, 1896). The goal was "to be able to create a story, to make it live during the moment of the telling, to arouse emotions-wonder, laughter, joy, amazement" (Sawyer, 1942). Augusta Baker, the first to hold the position of Storytelling Specialist at the New York Public Library, directed new storytellers to emphasize "the story rather than upon the storyteller, who is, for the time being, simply a vehicle through which the beauty and wisdom and humor of the story comes to the listeners" (Baker & Greene, 1977). The definitions given here are also based on 13 years of teaching an LIS Storytelling course at the graduate level and 4 years of co-teaching a new Data Storytelling course that instructs students in well-evidenced and honest communication practices at the intersection of data and story.
LIS storytelling emphasizes a triangular relationship between teller, audience, and story, a dynamic process that co-creates a particular telling of a story. "Storytelling at its best is mutual creation" (Baker & Greene, 1977). The librarian learns the basic character, setting, and plot of the story in advance but does not memorize every word, instead committing the events to memory so that the story's specific version (adaptation, instantiation, performance, etc.) emerges in the dynamic interchange of the storytelling triangle (Agosto, 2013;Agosto, 2016;Del Negro, 2017;MacDonald, 1993;Pellowski, 1977) Storytelling "must have at least a small element of spontaneity in the performance" (Pellowski, 1977). The LIS storyteller adapts the story to each audience, with each telling, across face-to-face or online live performances, recorded stories, and more.
For present purposes, storytelling is defined as telling a story within the dynamic triangle of the story, the teller, and the audience. The three relationships of the storytelling triangle inform each other; the audience's relationship to the teller hinges in part on how they understand the teller's own relationship to the story as well as which story the teller chooses to tell that audience (McDowell, 2020). For storytelling to occur, there must first be a basic relationship of trust between the teller and the audience. This trust is contextual and depends on demonstrating that the teller wants this audience to have and know this story. Whether a true story is received as truthful depends on this trust. Second, the teller has a relationship to the story, whether as creator or reteller. In LIS storytelling, the teller is "the instrument; the story is the main feature" (Bishop & Kimball, 2006). The storyteller is not neutral as they inevitably bring a point of view. The most obvious example is that of a personal story, in which the person who lived the story is telling it. This and other forms of expertise can create trust when telling a true story. Third, the audience has an interpretive relationship to the story. That relationship is informed by everything the teller says (gestures, performs, writes, records, etc.) in the course of telling the story, but it is not controlled by the teller (Lipman, 1999). The audience's interpretation can influence the meaning of the story for the teller as well, through listening to collective responses.
Storytelling polishes stories like editing polishes essays, with the audience serving as editor. Changes add collective understandings to the story by emphasizing particular words, characters, actions, and more. Audiences interpret stories as groups, socially constructing meanings. Retellings demonstrate how a story can be told so that others also recall and retell, and the story keeps traveling. "Stories live everywhere, but they rarely stay in one place" (Hearne, 1997). Storytelling entails dynamic collective interpretation, both synchronous and across long spans of time. So what is a story?

| Defining story
Story is here defined in two ways: structurally as narratively patterned information, and functionally as the content shared through the narrative experience of storytelling.

| Story as narratively patterned information
First, story is defined structurally, as narratively patterned information. To be a story, language must be structured by the chronology of narrative (beginning, middle, and end) and the logic of narrative (character, setting, and plot). This definition invokes two intellectual traditions: (a) the beginning-middle-end structure of folktales and their centrality in LIS discourses about story aesthetics and categorization, and (b) the logic of narrative as defined in semiotics.
Story as folktale has been central to LIS storytelling scholarship (Hearne, 1999a(Hearne, , 1999bMacDonald, 1982;Sturm, 1999). Folklorist and acclaimed storyteller Betsy Hearne lauds the aesthetics of folkloric stories, with their "fast-moving, highly structured elemental plots" and "clearly delineated archetypal characters," for allowing each listener "to glean different emotional, socio-cultural, intellectual, spiritual, and physical connections with a tale" (Hearne, 2011). Crossing both aesthetics and categorization, LIS storytelling ethics require respecting cultural story origins in retellings (Hearne, 1993a(Hearne, , 1993b. Folktales are foundational to and constitutive of canonical structural understandings of narrative. For example, folklore theorist Vladimir Propp's analysis of 100 Russian folktales yielded 31 distinct stages, in order, that structured every story (though not all stories contained all 31 elements) (Propp, 1968). Joseph Campbell's work details the structure of the hero's journey based on the sacred life stories of religious figures-Buddha, Jesus, and Mohammed among them (Campbell, 1949). Epistemologically, most of this work has been fundamentally empiricist, with story as a kind of material gathered and analyzed structurally and with a presumptive goal to identify "the universal" pattern(s).
But there are some limitations to analyzing story empirically as raw material, as demonstrated by narratology branches of semiotics. For example, Roland Barthes' structuralist analysis of an approximately 40-page novella yielded a 250+-page analysis and theorized five codes that drive narrative. These five codes "create a type of network" of interlocking meanings-the codes of actions, symbolism, semes, reference, and the hermeneutic or enigma code of suspense and discovery. While taking a highly structural and empirical approach to narrative analysis, Barthes' contributions are important because three of these five codes-the semes, reference, and enigma codes-also rely on a context of social experience and cultural knowledge and a "writerly" orientation such that the reader co-creates meaning (Barthes, 1974). As one sociologist of storytelling in protest and politics argues: "We expect ambiguity in narrative, that is, words and events will not mean what at first they seem to" (Polletta, 2006). In other words, Barthes and other scholars assert that stories are both amenable to (empirical) structural analysis and socially constructed in the narrative experience of the audience.

| Story as narrative experience
Second, story is defined as the content shared in the collective narrative experience of storytelling. The reception of collective interpretation can be viscerally sensed through live audience responses-laughter, applause, boos, hisses, gasps, sighs-which some storytellers have categorized (Holt & Mooney, 1994). Embodiment in the "ritual storytelling situation" of story hours indicates that collective narrative experience includes "corporeal aspects," even among pre-literate children (Hedemark & Lindberg, 2018). Most definitions of information center the individual and do not seriously consider groups, group reception, group interpretation, and other collective phenomena that shape exchanges on social media and other fast-paced "live" or "present" experiences. Because stories are constituted through narrative experience, and audiences are partly constitutive of the stories told to/with them, storytelling points to a way to begin to consider collective experiences of information.
There is evidence from other fields that narrative experience interconnects individuals. Neural story processing involves "mirroring process of embodied subjectivity" or experiences of "narrative emotions" predicated upon story's "ability to intertwine our experience of time" (Armstrong, 2020). Specialized "mirror neurons" in the brain contribute to experiencing empathy through story (Rizzolatti, 2008), and contextual empathy cues increase the potential for empathetic experience through story (Roshanaei et al., 2019). Though a complete review of neurological research on story as collective is beyond the present scope, these findings indicate that the multiplicity of a story audience is more complex than the mere sum of individual experiences. Storytelling as narrative experience can provide a key way of understanding collective information experience in future IS research.

| STORYTELLING AND DATA, INFORMATION, KNOWLEDGE, AND WISDOM
Beyond structure and narrative experience, operationalized definitions of information should be expanded by incorporating storytelling concepts. DIKW appears regularly in IS textbooks as "one of the fundamental, widely recognized and 'taken-for-granted' models in the information and knowledge literatures" and is often "used implicitly in definitions of data" (Rowley, 2007). T. S. Eliot is often credited with inspiring DIKW with his 1934 poem The Rock: "Where is the wisdom that we have lost in knowledge?/Where is the knowledge that we have lost in information?" DIKW has also been called the information hierarchy, the knowledge hierarchy, or the wisdom hierarchy. Like most IS definitions, the epistemology underlying DIKW is primarily empirical: "In the DIKW model, information is understood as organized and processed data" or "things fed into a computer" (Ma, 2012).
There are multiple ways of understanding and visualizing DIKW, but all acknowledge the set and sequence of data, information, knowledge and wisdom (Ackoff, 1989;Baškarada & Koronios, 2013;Bellinger et al., 2004;Bernstein, 2019). Jennifer Rowley's survey of DIKW in IS textbooks found consensus around the terms "data" and "information," but revealed disagreements in defining "knowledge" and "wisdom," including debates over whether "wisdom" should be part of the hierarchy at all (Rowley, 2007).
This section will revise DIKW in order to demonstrate how storytelling concepts open new areas of research into information in storytelling processes, roles of storytelling in knowledge sharing, and affordances and limitations of collective interpretation. First, each term in the DIKW pyramid is redefined as it relates to storytelling, with emphasis on potential areas for IS research. Second, I propose a new S-DIKW framework to inform future IS research on storytelling. This storytelling revision also serves as an example revision that could apply to other information frameworks in future. Each term in the hierarchy is below redefined with increasing detail, in relation to storytelling-related properties, functions, and potential for further research. This revised framework will not only argue for including wisdom in DIKW, but also prompt consideration of storytelling concepts and practices as necessitating an important paradigm shift in IS.

| Data
A datum is "an abstraction of a real-world entity (person, object, or event)" (Kelleher & Tierney, 2018). Data are "symbols that represent," collected from an environment as "products of observation" (Ackoff, 1989; cited in Rowley, 2007). Larger collections of data may have greater potential to inform, but "data is raw" (Bellinger et al., 2004). In storytelling terms, data are analogous to semes as the smallest units of signification in semiology (Barthes, 1974) or motifs as the smallest element of a folktale that persists in tradition (Clarkson & Cross, 1980). Despite frequent uses of "data-driven" or the verb "emerge" to describe analytical processes, and despite data being empirically valid, data can be conveyed in story only after a social constructionist process of human interpretation. Humans often use stories to interpret or convey interpretations, and data can be conveyed in story. Data in story context becomes information.

| Information
Information is commonly defined in DIKW terms as "format, structure, organization, meaning, and value" (Rowley, 2007). In a storytelling context, data is the content to which a story gives form, and information is the content to which story gives meaning. As before, stories convey meaning as narrative pattern and narrative experience.
Much information can be conveyed through story, but some information is particularly amenable to expression in narrative patterns, such as information that requires a chronology of related events (analogous to plot) to be comprehended. Also amenable to story form are information about people (character) as agents/ actors, and information that requires articulation of action in context (setting) for its accurate understanding.
Information in story form also entails narrative experience, including a storytelling relationship of trust between teller and audience. In the same way that storytellers retell the same folktale in various different ways (adaptations etc.), the expert-as-storyteller is able to express the same information in slightly different versions in order to reach different audiences. Such uses of information in story are routine in teaching, for example, where the same information may need to be retold slightly differently in order to engage all students.
Recall that storytelling polishes stories like editing polishes essays, with the audience serving as editor.
Audiences influence various ways that information in story is conveyed over time, as their reactions prompt changes in telling that add collective understandings to the story. However, information in story does not infinitely collapse into audience-pleasing social constructionism. Stories contain information in a structure of coherent meaning that both persists over time and accumulates adjustments in retelling. In other words, empirically, the same information (in story) can be communicated in different ways, synchronously and over time. Story and storytelling provide a rigorous way of understanding why that can be the case.
Story can do more than inform; a powerful story also moves the audience emotionally. One kind of emotional engagement comes from a sense that a story contains valuable lessons or insights. Audiences are more likely to listen to a story if they understand that, in doing so, they might gain knowledge.

| Knowledge
Knowledge in DIKW is most commonly defined as "actionable information" (Rowley, 2007). Storytelling can augment IS research about knowledge, increasing understandings of how knowledge is produced and communicated. Three examples of knowledge as story and in storytelling are explored here.
First, knowledge makes information actionable or useful. For example, effective knowledge management requires an ability to transfer complex sequences of steps as well as sustain organizational memory (Bray, 2006;Frappaolo, 2006). Story can give memorable form to complex sequences, linking one event to another with the embedded causal explanation of plot. Knowledge sharing via story has been both observed and demonstrated in many information work settings (Denning, 2011;Gabriel, 2000;Orr, 1996). Story can also give lasting form to organizational memory, as when important moments of an organization's history-its founding, weathering crisis, transformation of vision-are retold over time.
Second, some knowledge requires implicit contextual information, such as setting and cultural cues. Knowledge communicated in story can guide the knower's tone and gesture along with their actions. For example, knowledge of how to develop policy proposals in any democratic decision-making process is often shared through stories of those who have successfully made such proposals previously (Janda & Topouzi, 2015;Polletta, 2006). Knowledge in story communicates not only what to do but how to do it appropriately and offers a contextual example of why. Knowledge gained through storytelling, because of trust between teller and audience, affords an additional opportunity for learning why.
Third, stories can support knowledge generation in innovation contexts, building on knowledge gained from successes or failures. In situations of uncertainty or experimentation, telling the stories of what seemed to work or not work to an audience of colleagues invites "involvement in the innovation process" (Sergeeva & Trifilova, 2018). Storytelling as a co-creative process may also help to generate knowledge, particularly in relation to knowledge management systems that seek to capture knowledge created "at use time" (Fischer & Ostwald, 2001). Further research into knowledge in story form would likely uncover many instances that have been overlooked.
In some cases knowledge of how to do something is insufficient, such as when conflicts exist over foundational information and/or data. For example, Chun has compellingly argued that climate change debates rage on because of disagreements over how to understand the probabilistic uncertainties that are fundamental to science (Chun, 2015). In uncertain, conflictual, or paradoxical situations, knowledge of how to accomplish tasks is not enough. We need wisdom.

| Wisdom
In many more cultural and spiritual traditions than can be explored here, storytelling and wisdom are interconnected (Kari, 2007;Saihong, 2008;Sims Bishop, 2003). Wisdom has been underexplored in IS, and a recent call for research argues that "wisdom is the destination for information scientists and scientists of multiple disciplines" (Allen et al., 2019). In reviewing DIKW definitions, Rowley found that few attempted the difficult task of defining wisdom. Those that did defined wisdom as "accumulated knowledge, which allows you to understand how to apply concepts from one domain to new situations or problems" or as "the highest level of abstraction," with "the ability to see beyond the horizon" (Rowley, 2007). In order to reach the "destination" of wisdom, IS will need definitions of wisdom that can be operationalized in research. This section will explore how wisdom, defined in storytelling terms, could inform future IS storytelling research in three parts: (a) by proposing a story-based relationship between knowledge and wisdom, (b) by defining wisdom as dynamic and enacted rather than an inherent characteristic of individuals, and (c) by defining wisdom as story selection.

| Proposing a story-based relationship between knowledge and wisdom
Information entails understanding data, knowledge entails understanding information, and some argue that wisdom entails understanding knowledge in order to extract principles (Bellinger et al., 2004). Wisdom requires knowledge. In story, wisdom often means discovering a way beyond the ways that seem obvious. Protagonists succeed by doing the unexpected, such as answering a test with a test. For example, in the folktale Clever Manka, the peasant girl is tested when the Burgomaster tells her to hatch chicks from a dozen eggs in 1 day. She responds by bringing back a handful of millet, stating that, if he will plant, grow, and harvest the grain in a day, then she will bring him 12 chicks from the eggs (Lurie & Tomes, 1980). In the end, as the Burgomaster's wife, they come to an irresolvable conflict; he orders her to leave and take only her most beloved possession. After plying him with wine into deep sleep, Manka takes him, her husband the Burgomaster, as her most beloved possession (Ragan, 1998). In this final wise act, she defies his expectations by including him as a "possession," again inventing a way out of the dilemma.
In recent debates as to whether wisdom belongs as part of DIKW, one argument that wisdom does not belong invokes a wise person: "A wise person has to know, fallibly, plenty. A person that genuinely knows little or nothing, a person with an empty head, is not a wise person. Then this wide knowledge has to be of a certain kind, a kind that applies to the many and varied problems of life. A person may have encyclopedic knowledge of the facts and figures relating to the countries of the world, but that knowledge, of itself, will not make that person wise" (Fricke, 2019).
Fricke makes an excellent point that accumulation of knowledge alone is not wisdom, but goes on to argue that "wisdom is in an entirely different category to data, information, and know-how." To the contrary, wisdom is typically predicated on knowledge. Manka would not have been able to outwit the Burgomaster if she had not had knowledge of hatching chicks, farming millet, and of her husband's proclivity for wine after dinner. These are more than cultural details; they are knowledge, enacted by a character who refuses to accept the obvious. In other words, wisdom as "a metacognitive stance" involves knowing "the limits of what can be known and what cannot be," and implementing "processes of intellect in a way that eschews automatization" (Sternberg, 1990).
Knowledge without wisdom is not only incomplete, it can be horrifying. For example, the Biblical story of a baby whose parentage was in dispute, King Solomon's strategy for determining who should have the babyoffering to bisect the child-led to his granting the baby to the woman who did not agree to this gruesome proposal. Again, wisdom was "manifest in his ability to construct a solution that moved beyond the horns of the dilemma," and he granted the child to the mother who gave up her claim so that the child could live (Sternberg, 1990). If King Solomon had not had some knowledge that the true mother would spare her child's life above all else, then he would not have found a way beyond the ways that seemed obvious.
In contexts of struggle with daunting circumstances, information behavior research should seek wisdom. For example, information grounds theory is predicated on collective gatherings for "a primary instrumental purpose other than information sharing" that nonetheless enables "information flow" (Fisher et al., 2005). This theory informs, for instance, a study of parents of children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) who have been shown to gain useful information as well as emotional support and social connections through an NGO center . A more detailed and systematic analysis of knowledge and wisdom, as proposed in the S-DIKW framework below, would allow for serious analysis of the content of the information, emotional support, and social connections gained in this and similar studies. IS would benefit from analyzing wisdom, defined as discovering a way beyond the ways that seem obvious, through the lens of inherent ambiguity of story interpretation and storytelling dynamics.

| Defining wisdom as enacted rather than characteristic
In Fricke's argument above, the "wise person" example approaches wisdom as a characteristic. In storytelling, this might seem to imply that only a wise storyteller could tell a wisdom story. However, if wisdom is carried by stories and accumulates in them as they are retold, then wisdom should be defined as an emergent quality of the storytelling dynamic between teller and audience. Perhaps the association of wisdom and storytelling endures because story allows for accumulating wisdom, with the audience acting as editor. Being a storyteller is an action in context, not a characteristic, and wisdom may be similar. Just as knowledge need not be the attribute of one individual knower, wisdom may be socially constructed and enacted situationally.
If wisdom is enacted, then it can be the province of groups as well as individuals. For example, in a Haitian folktale, the girl Tipingee's stepmother tries to give her away as a servant to a stranger. The stepmother dresses her in red to mark her for taking, but Tipingee overhears and shares the plan with all of the village girls. So they all wear red, hiding her in plain sight, and repeat the (infectious) chorus of "I'm Tipingee, she's Tipingee, we're Tipingee too," until the stranger takes the stepmother instead (Ragan, 1998). The wisdom of collective information sharing in crisis, whether wearing red or online social convergence or even mutual aid via ICTs has been explored in IS although it has not always been called "wisdom" (Brock, 2007;Palen, 2008;Starbird & Palen, 2011). An IS storytelling research agenda would call for seeing and analyzing stories of surviving threat, crisis, and disaster as sources of wisdom.
The audience might hear the moral of the Tipingee story as any of these: that the village should stick together, children should stick together, adults do not always have children's best interests at heart, the powerful do not always have the interests of the vulnerable at heart, a combination of these, or something else. In other words, the choice to tell a story might be predicated on the ambiguity of story and its openness to different interpretations. Identifying contexts where story communicates effectively-not in spite of but because of its inherent ambiguity or interpretive openness-could reveal moments of enacted wisdom, providing clues to how individuals and groups develop wisdom.

| Defining wisdom as story selection
IS might better understand phenomena like organizational knowledge by considering the ways that choosing to tell a story is an overlooked communication form. This way of exploring wisdom would open research into, for example, how accomplished storytellers in organizations know which stories will be persuasive to meeting their ends (Lagasse, 2016). Understanding why a storyteller selects the story they tell may be significant to research on how stories inform. For example, understanding leaders as storytellers could open better paths to understanding enacted contextual wisdom about audience, wisdom about story, and self-reflective wisdom about the storyteller's own purpose, positionality, or bias. In community informatics, understanding story selection would help to augment emerging definitions of collective leadership in contexts such as community-wide digital literacy projects (Phelps, 2020). Wisdom is archetypally associated with age or endurance over generations of time. IS wisdom research might analyze stories shared in challenging organizational circumstances, seek audience assessments of wisdom, investigate story selection across organizational hierarchies, and understand why people choose to communicate information in story form. Revising the DIKW framework in light of these definitions of storytelling provides a path to concrete and rigorous approaches to wisdom research.

| NEW S-DIKW FRAMEWORK
Storytelling has implications for defining, understanding, and using data, information, knowledge, and wisdom. The DIKW hierarchy is a useful way of organizing interrelated concepts, and this storytelling revision of that framework suggests a way to structure storytelling research in IS. Frameworks organize interrelated sets of concepts used to "synthesize and elucidate the collective wisdom" within a shared scholarly endeavor (Sonnenwald, 2016). Ronquillo et al. similarly revised DIKW to account for "constant flux" in nursing informatics (Ronquillo et al., 2016). This section briefly proposes a revised storytelling S-DIKW framework. The S-DIKW framework succinctly encapsulates many of the above propositions for storytelling research in IS, and could be foundational to its advancement.
S-DIKW framework • S-Data: Ability to identify and interpret data from which information emerges that can be communicated in story. • S-Information: Ability to inform audiences by communicating data with context as story, in both form and narrative experience. • S-Knowledge: Ability to convey knowledge as complex actionable information through the construction and telling of a story, incorporating cultural and contextual cues. S-knowledge is shared frequently in innovative or experimental contexts. • S-Wisdom: Ability to know which story to tellincluding when, how, and to whom-in order to convey wisdom.
In the S-DIKW framework, each level is associated with a subset of storytelling abilities. Transitions between and across stages are based on storytelling and understanding how, when, whether, and why to communicate via storytelling. S-Information builds on the ability to interpret S-Data, and thus is updated to be an ability to communicate data with context, to inform through a story. S-Knowledge is information in action, constructed and shared as a story so that others can also know. S-Wisdom is defined as emerging from the storytelling triangle and predicated on the complex ability to select a story to tell.
Recent knowledge management research has revealed dangers to organizations that fail to share stories across levels of management hierarchy, risking inadvertent rigidities that impede exploration and agile responses to "turbulent environments." (Bray, 2006) Within organizations, understanding who is positioned to tell stories via their access to S-Data and S-Information as well as their role in conveying S-Knowledge and potentially S-Wisdom would provide an analytical framework with explanatory power for understanding why organizations fail to share stories. This framework could be the basis for organizational interventions to increase story sharing, by making roles in relation to each level both explicit and distributed across hierarchies. A storytelling intervention could better support collective exploratory activities that support agility. Although many organizations have embraced storytelling practices, there is as yet little theoretical understanding of why storytelling has been effective when it has.
The S-DIKW framework will be particularly useful in any contexts where information is presumed to be either generated or understood by more than one individual, collaboratively or collectively. From communities of practice to community informatics and beyond, researchers often seek various ways of tracking and tracing the social networks that enable information exchange. S-DIKW prompts consideration of networks as a means of storytelling and of story as a common but overlooked information form. Research could analyze the relevance and importance of each of the levels of S-DIKW in such networks, tracking instances of S-Data collection and S-Information communication as well as S-Knowledge sharing and S-Wisdom among advisors and advisees, mentors and mentees, and in other roles. Storytelling concepts open new areas of research about the roles of storytelling in knowledge sharing and the possibilities and limitations of collective interpretation.
Productive future research will require a framework like S-DIKW to undergird and to stimulate inquiry that rigorously incorporates storytelling concepts. Outside of theater and related humanities disciplines, perhaps no other field than IS is as well-positioned to take up storytelling research-if the field draws on the centurylong practice of storytelling in LIS for conceptual and practical foundations.

| CONCLUSION
Story, storytelling, and the S-DIKW framework are a departure from the individually-centered presumptions that currently underlie the IS field. Understanding information as collectively experienced requires understanding the long-lasting impact of storytelling on groups and of story as a fundamental information form. These concepts come from our own field's history of practice and have future potential to profoundly reshape research in information behavior, knowledge management, community informatics, and more. The dynamic process of storytelling in which stories are co-constructed between teller, tale, and audience intertwines empiricism with social constructionism in ways that challenge current epistemological assumptions in IS. Future IS storytelling research should account for story and the dynamics of storytelling not merely as a subset of information or of information behavior, but as a fundamental information form.
Storytelling, story, and S-DIKW research approaches should reframe IS thinking in at least three broad areas of pressing importance: (a) researching collective information experiences; (b) analyzing how information and story contribute to belief and belonging; and (c) comparing and contrasting story and misinformation.

| Researching collective information experiences
Storytelling's involvement of audiences prompts scrutiny of collective information experiences. IS has yet to engage deeply with information as a collective phenomenon, whether passed down through families or circulated in Facebook groups (or other emerging platforms). There has been initial IS research on the audience's experience of story reception as "enchantment," (Sturm, 1999) but there remains a lack of research on narrative experience and the persistence of story. Researching narrative experience calls for parallel approaches to recent embodiment experience in information behavior research and aspirations toward analysis of "moment-to-moment, embodied interaction" (Lueg & Bidwell, 2006). Future research based on S-DIKW might examine not just what is shared in story form and how, but also explicitly acknowledge and account for the vital role of the audience, analyzing how audience interpretations of a story influence what is heard and retold.

| Analyzing how information and story contribute to belief and belonging
Storytelling is powerful, and the stories that groups choose to collectively retell signal what they believe and when/where they feel they belong, whether their stories are factual or not. IS has potential to contribute to information-focused understandings of the "epistemic benefits of well-told stories" as narrative reasoning (Worth, 2008), particularly in relation to successes and failures in public trust. Storytelling plays a central role in experiences of collective information in public spaceslibraries among them-where belief and belonging are established or diminished. Story, storytelling, and the relationship of trust between teller and audience influences how groups choose what information they collectively trust. Collective information understandings will require scrutiny of the intersection of aesthetics and logic through exploration of the role of storytelling in collective sense-making and related information practices.
Organizations and families alike could serve as case studies for understanding how information in story influences belief and belonging. For example, when organizational leadership transitions fail, understanding the operant stories being retold about the situation and the various actors could be key to deciphering collective beliefs that led to distrust and turmoil. Belief and belonging also relate to historical family stories. To give a family example, my mother heard from her grandmother that, during the 1918 influenza epidemic, her grandmother's parents left food on the porch and visited through an open window, much the same "social distancing" practices as in the COVID-19 pandemic. Unfortunately, due to systemic racism and economic injustice, not all families experience continuity of story, belonging, or belief of trusted relatives' stories from a century ago. Not all stories that aid human survival survive. As T. S. Eliot asked, "Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?" Story and storytelling open conceptual ways to begin to frame research about collective information trust or distrust. Such research might shed light on why some information is sustained in story while other information is lost.

| Comparing and contrasting story and misinformation
Storytelling concepts could spark newly urgent comparative research examining information in story and narrative misinformation. To date, analysis of misinformation focuses on identifying its source, but IS storytelling research could introduce new questions to discern not only when and how misinformation is made into compelling stories, but also why large audiences retell and broadly diffuse inaccurate stories. Deeper focus on the agency of the audience in determining what they consider informative would provide a conceptual way of understanding information and knowledge communication that acknowledges collective impacts. Comparing informative storytelling with misinformational and disinformational storytelling might be an important complement to research on dissemination of propaganda and/as fake news. (Cooke, 2017).
Future IS research with the S-DIKW framework might take up current crises in truth, whether manipulative fake news or nationalist misinformation that, to date, have challenged AI and human interception efforts. Storytelling contributes to explanations of why some audiences divest from assessing the relationship between beliefs and evidence. Storytelling provides an important lens for information researchers and scholars that can address collective, group, crowd, or aggregate data about human opinions, ideas, and ideologies, whether face-toface or on social media. Serious consideration of storytelling as a dynamic process of exchange may be a missing piece in such efforts to build systems-both human and computational-that thwart misinformation, COVID-19 infodemic issues, political propaganda and more by examining collective audience interpretations-and metric indicators of those interpretations.
Although much IS research is based on an approach to knowing that centers computational systems, the inspiration of our field is that we do not center the computational alone but equally consider humanistic approaches and real data from human information use and behavior. A theoretical approach informed by a century of storytelling practice prompts reconsideration of both computational and humanistic IS research. Story, storytelling, and the S-DIKW model reveal a need for a paradigm shift in IS, adding story as a fundamental information form and storytelling as foundational to needed definitions of collective information. The powerful dynamics of storytelling should expand research in understanding how data, information, knowledge, and wisdom function in any information society.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Many thanks are due to early readers Betsy Hearne, Kyunwon Koh, Michael Twidale, and Ben Grosser. Thanks to Lori Kendall for citation advice. Finally, I offer hearty thanks to the reviewers and editors whose feedback was both informative and transformative, as in the best traditions of storytelling. [Corrections added on 23 Mar 2021, after first online publication: Ben Grosser's name has been included in "Acknowledgments" section] ORCID Kate McDowell https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0581-5965