.txtlab @ mcgill

Everyone is excited about using large language models for humanities research. For the first time we can ask models to identify much higher level humanistic constructs than we have in the past. This is what I call the second wave of scale. The first wave was about quantitative scaling — observing large amounts of cultural…

What makes a story “flow”? We often use the term casually to describe a narrative where one event seems to lead naturally to the next. But can that feeling be measured computationally? In our new ACL paper, “Fiction Flows: A Replication and Reinterpretation of Narrative Sequentiality,” co-authored with Sil Hamilton, Haiqi Zhou, and Federico Pianzola, we revisit…

Stories have always taught us something. From Aesop’s fables to modern novels, narratives model values, decisions, consequences, and ways of being in the world. As the literary critic Wayne Booth famously put it: all stories teach. But if that’s true, an intriguing question follows: what exactly have novels been teaching us over time? And how might we study…