The Narrative Search results page is designed to help you to quickly find key narratives on any subject and get a clear understanding of the most significant and relevant discourse taking place around your topic. This guide will walk you through the following key features to enhance your search experience:
Understanding how to use Macro versus Micro Narratives
Understand how to get the most out of a Narrative Briefing
Understand how to interpret Narrative Top Themes
Analyse Narrative Results to understand the context of the discussions.
By the end of this guide, you'll be able to:
Uncover the biggest and most relevant narratives within your search results.
Extract actionable insights to measure their influence on the discussion.
Maximize the value of your search results to inform your decisions.
Macro versus Micro Narratives
Macro Narratives have a broad focus and are generally longer running. Select Macro to view and understand broader trends, patterns, and shifts in the conversation over time. Macro Narratives are perfect for analysing long-term trends and understanding thematic arcs.
Micro Narratives have a narrow focus and are often shorter in duration. Select Micro to identify conversations focused closely around a specific event, issue, or topic. Includes data up to the previous day. Micro Narratives are best for real-time conversations or niche topics over short periods.
Currently both Micro and Macro Narrative views are available when searching for narratives in the mainstream Media, whilst if searching for Public narratives, you only get the Macro Narratives view.
Narrative Briefing
The Narrative Briefing provides a succinct summary of the top 100 narratives related to your search query. It highlights key themes, topics, and trends, giving you a clear overview of the conversation before diving deeper. This summary helps you quickly grasp the broader context and main insights surrounding your topic.
Whether you are a journalist or researcher, the Narrative Briefing can be useful in a number of ways:
The Narrative Briefing helps you identify the most relevant and emerging narratives and themes, guiding you towards potential story angles.
Before reporting or writing about a topic, you can use the briefing to grasp the broader conversation.
By including the most discussed themes to construct the briefing, users can track shifting public opinion or viral narratives in real time.
Interest Over Time
When searching for narratives in the media, this chart shows you the daily and weekly media interest in the narratives related to your topic. And when searching for narratives in the public, this chart shows you the daily and weekly public interest in the narratives related to your topic. Interest is represented on a scale ranging from 0 to 100. A value of 100 is the peak interest, whilst a value of 50 means that the total interest in the topic is half as popular. A score of 0 means there was not enough data for your search query to measure interest.
Look for consistent high interest, whether in the media, public discourse, or both as this signals a topic’s widespread relevance. Sudden spikes or dips are also key indicators, revealing moments that may have triggered a shift in attention. Exploring these patterns can help you understand how and why the discussion around a topic is changing.
Top Themes
Narratives AI identifies and ranks the Top Themes found in the narratives related to your search query. To get the top themes, we analyze the top narratives in your search query by volume and then group them by similarity, into distinct themes. The interest in a theme is represented as a % and is calculated by comparing the number of narratives in that theme, to the total number of narratives that have been analysed to generate the top themes. Clicking on the drop down icon on each bar chart will give you a succinct summary of what the theme is about.
Narratives AI also gives you a view of the Distribution of top themes and their underlying Narratives. Each coloured group represents a Theme, and the nodes or circles within the coloured group are individual Narratives. The size of a Theme reflects its overall level of interest, so bigger means more interest. And within each Theme, the largest circles or nodes represent the most prominent Narratives, often found at the centre of the bubble.
Narrative Results List
This table lists the narratives related to your topic, ranked by relevance. A narrative is a cluster of statistically similar news or social content, which describe an event, theme, person or story over a period of time. The “Significance” of a narrative shows how large it is in comparison to other narratives in your search query. You can also use the tabs across the top of the table to view the narratives grouped by Theme, and then ranked by relevance.
Click on a narrative for more details or use the "Why did this match my search?" feature to understand how the narrative is connected to your query. This is an AI-Driven explanation to help you understand why the subject you're searching fits into a narrative. You'll have the option to quickly generate a clear explanation that analyses the relevant part of the narrative, linking it to your search query and providing contextual insights.
Each narrative listed in the table has the following attributes:
An concise title - Helping you gain a quick understanding of the narrative’s topic and main points.
Contextual Summary - Get a brief summary detailing the connection between your subject of interest and any matching narrative.
Most representative images - Providing a visual representation of the narrative, helping you quickly identify the content and tone.
Theme label - Pointing out the Themes that a Narrative is focused on.
Date - Identify when the narrative started and how long it ran.
Significance score and percentage of change - Understand the size of the narrative and its growth, as well as how it's trending over time.
Volume spark line - See how the narrative has evolved over time, including spikes and dips in attention.
Sorting Narratives Results
Sort narratives based on relevance, and get a Size score for each Narrative. The Size score of a narrative shows how large it is in comparison to other narratives in this search. It is on scale of 1-100 and takes into account the amount of content contributing to each narrative within your selected search date range, compared with the total amount of content that is part of all conversations matching your search.
Filtering Narratives by Theme
The theme filter at the top of the Narratives lists makes it easier for you to find narratives by Theme, streamlining the process of discovering relevant narratives.
Here's how it works:
The Narrative results list allows you to tab across the table to view narratives by theme.
Once filtered, you can apply changes to the sort order to find the most relevant, and significant narratives in that theme.
Narratives with a low relevance score that are uncategorised will include an uncategorised tag label and cannot be filtered.
What is the Size score?
The “Significance” of a narrative shows how large it is in comparison to other narratives in this search. It is a 1-100 scale based on the amount of content contributing to each narrative within your selected search date range, compared with the total amount of content that is part of all conversations matching your search.
Narrative Growth
The percentage of change measures how much a narrative's significance has increased or decreased within your search and specified date range.
How it Works:
The narrative's size score is calculated as a percentage of the total volume of search results for each day (if you are searching micro data) or week (if you are searching macro data) .
The percentage of change is then calculated by calculating the shift in size throughout the entire time range.
Exporting the Data in Narratives Search Results
The Interest Over Time chart or the Narrative Distribution chart can be download to an Excel file to use it at a later time or to compare themes across different searches. Excel exports of these charts will include the data from the chart as well as the search query used and the search filters applied. PNG download options are also available to use in your reporting, along with chart descriptions to help you understand the data you're looking at. Wanna learn more? Then click the button below to delve into the Detailed Narrative View.
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