This paper examines ways in which narrative inquiry might inform natural language processing methods to explore human values. Considering the centrality of storytelling to human sense-making and the far reach of stories across today’s digital infrastructures, we argue that a narrative lens could be fruitful for computational approaches to value analysis. In this paper, we bring together existing work on narrative understanding and value detection, identifying and elaborating on three focal points for NLP task design: narratives, corpora, and audiences.