Federico Pianzola
Speaking Sessions
AI for the Computational Study of Narrative and Readers
Narrative can be conceptualised as a complex system, with pragmatic benefits for our description of interpretative and affective processes involved in reading. In this talk, I show how to use AI tools to model narratives and how readers engage with them. Considering the relations between text, reader, and reading situation as constitutive of narrative requires a way of looking at stories keeping in mind that the reader’s experiential background, their cognitive-affective states, and the situational context all play a crucial role in the emergence of what we call a narrative. Here I suggest that Large Language Models can be considered artificial systems that simulate a (disembodied) reading process and make it possible to model narrative as a complex system, including the encoded experiential background of the (simulated) reader.
Biography
Federico Pianzola is Assistant Professor of Computational Humanities at the University of Groningen (Netherlands), where he directs the Master’s in Digital Humanities. He is the Principal Investigator of the ERC Starting Grant project GOLEM (Graphs and Ontologies for Literary Evolution Models) and previously completed a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Global Fellowship at the University of Milan-Bicocca (Italy) and Sogang University (South Korea). He is member of the scientific advisory board of OPERAS (the Research Infrastructure supporting open scholarly communication in the social sciences and humanities in the European Research Area) and president of the International Society of the Empirical Study of Literature (IGEL). He is also managing editor of the journal Scientific Study of Literature and he is on the editorial board of two other journals: the Journal of Computational Literary Studies and the Journal of Cultural Analytics. His most recent book Digital Social Reading: Sharing Fiction in the 21st Century has been published by MIT Press in January 2025.