Narration is an essential element in the transmission of written and oral stories and corresponds to both who is telling the story and how the story is told. Philosophers and structuralists have analyzed and defined different narrative structures. Recently, researchers in Machine Learning (ML) or Natural Language Processing (NLP) have been particularly interested on the extraction and understanding of narrative structure in different collections. On this work, we present a survey on theories, research and techniques around narrative structure: from linguistic theories to automatic approaches used for the extraction and analysis of narrative structure in different multimedia collections and annotation tools.