New research project will map the sensuous power of literature

Can you feel the salty sea air and hear the waves when you read Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse? Or can you almost taste the madeleine cake when Marcel Proust describes it in In Search of Lost Time?
This is the ambition of the research project The Senses of Stories, which combines volunteers' assessments of texts with computer-based analyses to investigate how literature creates mental and sensory experiences.

"Readers simulate – to varying degrees – situations and scenes visually or by imagining, for example, tastes, sounds, and touches. With the project, we want to understand how much variance there is between readers, but also which texts create great sensory experiences, says Pascale Feldkamp, head of the project.

The project invites volunteers to read individual sentences and assess them based on three different dimensions:

• Imageability: How vividly does the sentence create a mental image?
• Concreteness: Does the sentence describe something that can be sensed?
• Sensory activation: Which senses – such as sight, hearing, smell, taste or touch – are activated during reading?

The sentences come from both fiction, non-fiction and fan fiction and are shown without context, so that the participants only assess their immediate experience.

"You don't have to be a researcher or a literate person to be able to feel whether a sentence hits you sensually. In fact, it is also a strength of the project that we are dependent on the assessments of ordinary readers, because they are the ones the literature is ultimately aimed at. We hope that many people will want to contribute with exactly the knowledge that only they have," says Rie Eriksen, PhDstudent and affiliated with the project.

Can the sensory experiences of literature be measured?
By combining thousands of human assessments with digital analysis methods, the researchers investigate whether the sensory dimension of literature can be described and quantified to a certain extent.

Among other things, the project will shed light on how different types of text engage the reader's senses, how empathy arises during reading, and whether there are systematic differences between literary and non-literary texts.

The perspective also extends into the development of future language technologies, where the bodily and sensory dimension of reading today is only included to a limited extent.

"Now that machine-generated texts are becoming a normal part of our everyday lives, it is also becoming more important to understand whether they enable the same kind of reading experiences as human-written texts. In this comparison, we often talk about style and choice of words, but just as important for the reading experience is whether the text can evoke sensory perceptions. That is: can the algorithm write sensually 'without a body'?", says Pascale Feldkamp.

Rie Eriksen elaborates:

"We often understand reading as a purely mental activity, i.e. something that goes on in the head. But our body is with us all the way. When you read that a character grips his or her scarf tightly, there are readers who actually feel something in their hand. There's nothing mysterious about that, it's really just the language that activates our sensory system. And that's exactly what we want to map."

Collaboration between humanities and digital methods

The Senses of Stories has been launched by the Golden Matrix Project, a collaboration between the Center for Grundtvig Research and the Center for Humanities Computing at Aarhus University in collaboration with Citizen Readers, which specializes in involving volunteers in text annotation for research purposes.

The research group consists of Pascale Feldkamp, Andrew Piper, Rie Eriksen, Yuri Bizzoni, Ethan Weed and Federico Pianzola.

Join us

Anyone interested can contribute to the research through the project's online platform, where you can freely choose between different annotation tasks. 

The project can be found at Zooniverse:
https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/citizenreaders/the-senses-of-stories

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Contact

Pascale Feldkamp, PhD student,
Centre for Humanities Computing
School of Culture and Society
Aarhus University
Mail: pascale.feldkamp@cas.au.dk
Phone: +45 8715 1317