Abstract: Narrative theory has always been contentious. Writers have alternately resisted and reclaimed structural theories of storytelling for millennia; but to date, their arguments have largely been philosophical, relying on anecdotal evidence or writers’ own singular experiences. In this presentation, I will explore how recent advances in computational linguistics have, for the first time, enabled researchers to pursue an empirical dramaturgy, using quantified metrics of story to rigorously test and potentially falsify narrative theories. I will present both published and ongoing research in this growing area, examining the role of narrative reversals and emotion dynamics in shaping audience responses across large-scale story corpora, as well as a new project that aims to construct a “narrative genome” ground-truth dataset based on thousands of detailed reader responses to books.
Speaker
Samsun KnightAssistant Professor at University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management, Faculty Affiliate at the University of Toronto School of Cities