Martin, I think your work sounds just fabulous -- please keep us informed
about it as it progresses! As for recommendations,you might check out a
book by Renato Rosaldo, Culture and Truth: A Remaking of Social Analysis,
where he explicitly talks about the role of narrative in social scientific
research (which I'm assuming is the overall "genre" you would place yours
in).
Also, I agree with a few who've responded to you that you don't need the
hard 'n fast separation between narrative and argumentation. Narrative
can be constituent parts of an argument, as you would find (for instance)
in the paper Deep Play by Geertz, or in the book-length study, Fiction in
the Archives, by Natalie Davis. But I would not accept a notion that
narrative and more analytic argumentation represent the usual distinction
we have (in the research community) between "qualitative" and
"quantitative" methods. I agree with Vera, David, and others that
representing things in quantitative form can be quite helpful, even in
so-called "qualitative" research. But the distinction that I see Martin
drawing out goes much deeper than that. It would be something more along
the lines of a certain kind of commitment, a certain type of valuing.
David, I don't know a thing about the computer programs you describe,
but surely there would be a difference between saying something like
"agent within a dynamic system" vs. writing/talking of THIS person in THIS
particular historical context. Bakhtin (among others) would argue that
narrative captures historicity (important for Martin's work) and a sense
of "moral particularity" -- that the value and meaning of actions and
persons for agents is deeply embedded in their particularity. So, for
Martin (and others of us), the choice of narrative modalities vis-a-vis
other types of modalities is not simply an instrumental one.
-- Deborah