Graphs and Ontologies for Literary Evolution Models (GOLEM)

Stories are a crucial element of our evolutionary legacy (Boyd 2009; Gottschall 2012), they are instruments that help us organize our experiences, develop mind reading, and enhance emotional attunement (Herman 2003; Zunshine 2006; Mar and Oatley 2008). Given their utmost importance for human beings, in order to better understand the specific beneficial effects that stories can have, we need to study how they evolved, adapting to different societies and cultures. The evolution of fictional storytelling goes beyond literary history, having its roots in oral performance and having developed into audiovisual and interactive narrative forms (e.g. films and video games). However, despite this long trajectory, we know very little of how fiction evolves. Online fiction allows us to collect thousands of data points about readers’ response to a text, in the form of comments to paragraphs (e.g. Wattpad) or chapters (e.g. the Archive of Our Own), ratings, and book reviews (e.g. Goodreads). Thanks to online fiction, we can design robust experiments for the study of readers’ thoughts and emotions and the text that elicited them. GOLEM will be the first large-scale project studying the evolution of fiction and its effects, using data available thanks to digital and social media