Micro-narratives are the small, self-signified fragments of everyday story that people actually tell — captured at volume and interpreted by the tellers themselves rather than by a researcher. In Dave Snowden‘s sense-making practice they are the raw material that tools like SenseMaker are built to gather, on the argument that formal qualitative methods tidy away the very texture that matters.
Also see Street Narratives, Meso Narratives and Meta Grand Narrative.
Flag: a homonym
The word is used independently in linguistics, where micronarrative names a unit of analysis for quantifying gesture in multimodal discourse — “one or more subsequent clauses on an identifiable discourse topic, where meaning is created or co-created by one or more speakers.”
See Anna Jelec, Małgorzata Fabiszak, ‘Micronarrative: Unit of analysis for quantitative studies of gesture in focus interviews’, Lingua (2018).
This is a different concept that happens to share a word. It concerns measuring hand movements in recorded interviews, not the narrative substrate of a culture. We note it only because the overlap is a live trap.