Misc Narrative Research Links

A few papers I cut to save room in the newsletter post at end of month.

Digital Social ReadingSharing Fiction in the Twenty-First Century - MIT Press. A new book covering Wattpad, fanfic, and other online fiction phenomena, by Federico Pianzola. A bit of a great “the kids are alright” take: He also asserts that grassroots media and open, bottom-up communities are crucial to the success of many reading practices today, especially with young audiences.

Computational Modeling of Characters — slides by Luca Giovannini / Daniil Skorinkin from Potsdam on some network analysis (and textual analysis) of characters in text. I enjoyed this!

Mini Worldlit: A Dataset of Contemporary Fiction from 13 Countries, Nine Languages, and Five Continents in Journal of Open Humanities Data — via Maria Antoniak, Piper and Bamman and more.

Narrative Simplification in Human and AI Retelling | Semantic Scholar — How do AI and human simplifications differ? “While both humans and LLMs tend to condense stories, their approaches differ: humans generally maintain or improve readability, whereas LLMs, without specific instructions on persona-based retellings, often reduce readability. However, with appropriate prompts,..”

Using Large Language Models for Understanding Narrative Discourse - ACL Anthology, from Proceedings of the The 6th Workshop on Narrative Understanding - ACL Anthology. Another Piper paper. “Leveraging a dataset of human-annotated passages spanning 18 distinct narrative and non-narrative genres, our work provides empirical support for the deictic theory of narrative communication. This theory posits that a fundamental function of storytelling is the focalization of attention on distant human experiences to facilitate social coordination.”