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# Review incoming stories

On this page you can look over the stories being collected over the web (or entered by you). You can also correct errors in entered stories, anonymize entered stories, and mark stories to ignore.

## What to do here

If you want to look at all of your collected stories, ignore the "Filter by" choices above the list of stories, and just click on a story in the list. Below the list of stories you will see the information for the selected story.

If you want to look at specific subsets of stories, choose a question on one or both of the "Filter by" choice boxes, then choose which answers you want to see. For example, you might choose "Age," then "25-50," and you would see only stories told by people between 25 and 50. If you select two questions, you will see only stories that match both criteria, such as for example, people between 25 and 50 who told stories about which they said they felt "satisfied."

You can also use this page to — very carefully — do any of these things.

- You can correct mistakes in your entered stories. If you entered your stories by hand, you may have mistyped an entry; edit your mistakes here.
- You can anonymize stories, removing names and other identifying details people entered when they used your story form.
- You can mark stories to be ignored. Maybe a story was a test entry, or the person said nothing but "I don't get it," or you made a mistake in data entry. To mark a story to be ignored, enter any text in the "Reason to ignore" field. That story will be left out of all graphs and reports, and will be visible only on this page. (You can sort by the "Ignore" field to see the stories you have chosen to ignore and why.)

To change a story, select it in the list of stories, then make your changes in the panel that appears below the list. Be careful! You might want to export your story collection before you start making changes, as a backup.

## Connections to other pages

To review your incoming stories, you must first (a) create a story collection (which must be associated with a story form) and (b) collect, enter, or import some stories.

Any changes made on this page will impact every NarraFirma page on which story data is displayed, including all of the graphs in the catalysis section of NarraFirma. If you need to make changes to your stories and you have already started doing your catalysis work, be sure to go back over your observations to make sure they are still valid.

## Frequently-asked questions

### Why do I have to mark stories as ignored? Why can't I just delete them?

It's one thing to lose your own work, but losing the time and attention of the dozens or hundreds of people who told stories in your project is much worse. You can't get those stories back again. So we have designed NarraFirma to protect your stories by passing over them rather than fully deleting them from its database.

However, you can permanently delete a story if you need to. Here's how.

1. Export your story collection to a CSV file.
2. Using a spreadsheet program, delete the row that describes the story you want to remove.
3. Import the changed CSV file into NarraFirma as a new story collection.
4. Delete the previous version of the story collection.

This will prevent the story from appearing on the "Review incoming stories" page.

There is a second layer of ignoring that you may also want to bypass. A deleted story collection, like an ignored story, is not actually removed from the NarraFirma database. It is simply unmoored from the project, and it floats, disconnected, in the database. A deleted story collection can be brought back to life by creating a new collection with the (exact) same name. We chose to do this, again, to prevent the accidental loss of stories.

So, if you want to make sure that a story (and the story collection that holds it) does not exist anywhere in your project:

1. Go to the "Import & Export" page, under "Project administration."
2. Export a "project snapshot with stories" to a JSON file. This will export the project, but it will skip over any disconnected story collections in the database.
3. Reset the project. This will remove all of its data.
4. Import your saved JSON project file, choosing the option "project snapshot (with or without stories)." Now the story you removed does not exist anywhere in the project.