Could "narbs" help you tell your social media story?
Ananda Mitra of the Department of Communication, at Wake Forest University, Winston-Salem, North Carolina and colleague Sanjay Mamani point out that there are increasing amounts of unstructured data permeating the internet and in big databases. They refer to the narrative bits of unstructured data, the social media updates and the like as "narbs". They have now developed a theoretical approach that could bring order from the chaos and have demonstrated its advantages in making sense of the data that emerged from Egypt during the so-called Arab Spring. The same approach might be applied to other large-scale events such as political campaigns, terrorist attacks, protests, marketing and advertising campaigns and even at the personal level for biography or autobiography.