Computational Literary Studies

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3 papers in the last four weeks, against 1 the four weeks before. 0.0% of all new papers.

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Molecules of a Story: Community Detection in PMI-weighted Narrative Networks
Oct 5, 2026Kasper Fyhn, Rebekah BagliniComputational Literary Studies
Department of Linguistics and Cognitive Science, Aarhus University · TEXT - Center for Contemporary Cultures of Text, Aarhus University · Center for Humanities Computing, Aarhus University
Retrieving Biblical Intertextual References in Karen Blixen's Seven Gothic Tales
Sep 28, 2026András Kovács, Alexander Conroy, Daniel Hershcovich +1Computational Literary Studies Lexical Retrieval
Department of Nordic Studies and Linguistics, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark · Department of Computer Science, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark
When Victorian Becomes a Prompt: Literary Periodization as a Generative Constraint in 100 AI-Generated Novels
Sep 8, 2026Mehdy Sedaghat PayamComputational Literary Studies Controllable Text Generation
Independent Scholar
Syntactic Patterns and Stylistic Functions in Narrative Prose: A Rule-Based and Machine-Learning Approach
Sep 7, 2026Stefana JanicijevicComputational Literary Studies Stylometry
How LLMs Build Fictional Worlds: Setting and Narrative Space in AI-Generated Creative Storytelling
Sep 2, 2026Katrin Rohrbacher, Björn Nieth, Emmanuelle Salin +2Computational Literary Studies Text Generation
The Text and Language Lab, Department of Digital Humanities and Social Studies (DHSS), FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany · Department Artificial Intelligence in Biomedical Engineering (AIBE), FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany · Munich Center for Machine Learning (MCML), Munich, Germany +3
Constructing Parallel Multidimensional Chromatic Lexicons for Corpus-Assisted Analysis of Russian and English Texts
Aug 3, 2026Larisa NikitinaComputational Literary Studies
Faculty of Languages and Linguistics Universiti Malaya Malaysia
Detecting Experiential Intertextuality Across Migration Routes: Beyond Surface Similarity in French Narratives
Jul 31, 2026Sakayo Toadoum Sari, Nelly Robin, Michelle Auzanneau +5Computational Literary Studies
1CRIL, CNRS – Université d’Artois, France · 2CEPED, Université Paris Cité, France · 3EDA, Université Paris Cité, France
Creative Transformation in Literary Texts: Modelling Change Across Representational Levels
Jul 30, 2026Ioana-Roxana Boriceanu, Liviu P. DinuComputational Literary Studies Computational Creativity
Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science · University of Bucharest, Romania · Human Language Technologies Research Center
Beyond Similarity: Grounded Agentic Extraction and Expert-Adjudicated Evaluation of Intertextuality in Classical Chinese Histories
Jul 30, 2026Zhaoji Wang, Wanyu Si, Jun WangHistorical Document Analysis Computational Literary Studies
Department of Information Management, Peking University, Beijing, China · Research Center for Digital Humanities, Peking University, Beijing, China
Theatre Chapbooks At Scale: A Statistical Comparative Analysis of Typography
Jul 29, 2026Diego Belzarena, Seginus Mowlavi, Paula Casariego Castiñeira +3Historical Document Analysis Computational Literary Studies
UDELAR, CB · Université Paris-Saclay, ENS Paris-Saclay, Centre Borelli, France · CB +8
Automatic Thematic Indexing of Large Literary Corpora: A Machine Learning Approach to Voltaire's Complete Works
Jul 10, 2026Miguel Arana-Catania, Gillian Pink, Glenn RoeComputational Literary Studies Multi-Label Classification
University of Oxford, UK
From Gentlemen to Frontiermen: Masculine Formations in English-Language Fiction (1771--1930)
Jul 3, 2026Rong WangComputational Literary Studies
University of Tuebingen
Story Operators: Decomposing the Original $\to$ Sequel Transformation in Embedding Space
Jun 24, 2026W. Frederick ZimmermanComputational Literary Studies
Nimble Books LLC
Three Buddhist Vocabularies: Computational Stylometry of the English Pali Canon across Sutta, Vinaya, and Abhidhamma
Jun 24, 2026Joy BoseComputational Literary Studies Stylometry
Independent Researcher, Bengaluru, India
Predicting Poets' Origins from Verse: A Computational Analysis of Regional Linguistic Fingerprints in the Complete Tang Poems
Jun 23, 2026Chi-Sheng Chen, Hung-Yun LiuComputational Literary Studies
Harvard University · University of Washington
AI as a Tool for Simulation-Based Experiments in Literary Studies
Jun 1, 2026Matthew WilkensComputational Literary Studies Controllable Text Generation
Department of Information Science Cornell University
GraphLit: Learning Text-Enriched Dynamic Character Network Representations for Literary Study
May 27, 2026Gaspard Michel, Elena V. Epure, Romain Hennequin +2Computational Literary Studies Heterogeneous GNNs
Deezer Research, Paris, France · IDIAP, Martigny, Switzerland · Loria, Nancy, France +1
A Fine-Tuned BERT Classifier for Personal-Letter Titles in Late-Ming and Early-Qing Collected Works
May 21, 2026Queenie LuoHistorical Document Analysis Computational Literary Studies
Harvard University
QOuLiPo: What a quantum computer sees when it reads a book
May 13, 2026Christophe JurczakComputational Literary Studies
Quantonation, Dallas, TX, USA
SAGE: Hierarchical LLM-Based Literary Evaluation through Ontology-Grounded Interpretive Dimensions
May 8, 2026Tianyu Wang, Nianjun ZhouComputational Literary Studies LLM Evaluation
Mercy University, Math & Computer Science Department · Dobbs Ferry, NY, USA · IBM T.J. Watson Research Center +1
From graphemic dependence to lexical structure: a Markovian perspective on Dante's Commedia
Apr 24, 2026Angelo Maria SabatiniComputational Literary Studies
The BioRobotics Institute · Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna · Pisa, Italy
Markov reads Pushkin, again: A statistical journey into the poetic world of Evgenij Onegin
Apr 22, 2026Angelo Maria SabatiniComputational Literary Studies Markov Models
The BioRobotics Institute Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna Pisa, Italy
Rank-Turbulence Delta and Interpretable Approaches to Stylometric Delta Metrics
Apr 21, 2026Dmitry Pronin, Evgeny KazartsevComputational Literary Studies Stylometry
HSE University
'The Order in the Horse's Heart': A Case Study in LLM-Assisted Stylometry for the Discovery of Biblical Allusion in Modern Literary Fiction
Apr 21, 2026Ewan CameronComputational Literary Studies LLM-Assisted Annotation
Actuarial Mathematics & Statistics, School of Mathematical & Computer Sciences, Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh EH14 4AS, UK

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Molecules of a Story: Community Detection in PMI-weighted Narrative Networks

Kasper Fyhn, Rebekah Baglini

Department of Linguistics and Cognitive Science, Aarhus University · TEXT - Center for Contemporary Cultures of Text, Aarhus University · Center for Humanities Computing, Aarhus University

Computational Literary Studies

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Automatically extracted narrative networks -- graphs with entities as nodes and their relations as edges -- have proven useful for revealing central narrative structures through salient entities and their connections (Tangherlini et al. 2020; Labatut and Bost 2019). But a narrative is more than those central structures that everything else revolves around. This work is concerned with the everything else: brief sub-plots, small clusters of descriptions, or associations between minor characters that go under the radar at the macro-level. We present an approach to unearth such peripheral structures. They involve rare entities with limited textual presence, overshadowed by dominant entities and lost among each other in the long tail of many but rare entities (Baayen 2001). We leverage the known tendency of pointwise mutual information (PMI, Church and Hanks 1990) to inflate for rare events, turning its weakness into a strength by weighting edges with PMI to foreground peripheral entity configurations. Communities extracted from the resulting network are structural traces of underlying narrative elements. We demonstrate the approach on The Lord of the Rings. From measures of how concentrated or dispersed a community's activations are across the text, a typology emerges that reveals that peripheral structures form more than a single class: episodic passages, echoing long-distance connections, and recurring threads each surface as distinct configurations. The approach is conceptually simple and surfaces fine-grained narrative details that are lost in abundance, though its deliberate amplification of weak signals comes with inherent sensitivity -- best understood as a lens for exploration rather than a robust extraction pipeline.

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