Impact & Fiction

We all seem to have hunger for stories that we can find among other in literature. The desire to get more stories grows and now we are surrounded by them everywhere. But surprisingly we cannot fully understand, on the one hand, to what extent and how exactly stories told in books impact our lives, and the technology, on the other hand, can be very smart but still not smart enough to tell a good impactful story. My colleague Joris van Zundert calls it a Reversed George Lucas Paradox, meaning that Lucas knew how he wanted to make the “Star Wars” but the technical things didn’t work good enough, but we have beautiful technology and face the challenge of analysing and synthesising the narrative. It’s always better to fill the gaps in research by common effort so we gathered in beautiful ZiFcenter in Bielefeld to contribute to literary studies en get inspiration from each other. With special thank to J. Berenike Herrmann and Federico Pianzola for organising this event and to my colleagues Marijn Koolen and Joris van Zundert for collaborative thinking and support.

At CLIN2023, the 33rd Meeting of Computational Linguistics in The Netherlands, Carsten Schnober presented a paper in which we consider the quality of lemmatization and part-of-speech (POS) tagging results from a number of standard parsers often used in computational research (and natural language processing tasks in general). We came to this comparison because, when inspecting… Continue reading Interrogating Parsing for Literary Fiction

IGEL conference 2023 In the movie Three Thousand Years of Longing, Alithea says to the Djinn, “I’m not sure how it works. I am a literary scholar. We don’t know much.” Just like all scientists, I would add, who are constantly in the search for better understanding phenomena. After all, knowledge is built progressively. Fortunately,… Continue reading What do we know about literature?