Publications

Citizen Science Initiative

The Lives of Literary Characters is a citizen science initiative that aims to harness the passion of readers to develop more transparent AI systems to understand human storytelling. Come join!

Collaborations (Student Lab Papers)

Nikoo Sarraf and Jennifer Chen. Queer Fans: The Difference that Queer Fanfiction Makes. October 2021.

Nathan Drezner. Everyday Specialization: The Coherence of Editorial Communities on Wikipedia. September 2020.

Cheng Lin and Benjamin LeBrun. Streaming Bias: Studying Music Curation on Spotify. June 2020.

Brian Powell. Unlevel Playing Fields: Institutional Inequality in College Basketball. February 2020.

Anne Meisner, Vicky Svaikovsky, Will Schumer, and Cheng Lin. Superheroes and Socialites: A Social Network Analysis of the Character Universe and the Series. April 2019.

Eve Kraicer. Social Characters: The Hierarchy of Gender in Contemporary Fiction. February 2019.

Vicky Svaikovsky, Anne Meisner, Eve Kraicer, and Matthew Sims. Racial Lines: Race, Ethnicity, and Dialogue in 780 Hollywood Films, 1970-2014. June 2018.

Fedor Karmonov. 1000 Words. [An experiment in auto-generated poetry in response to computer vision of Van Gogh’s collection of self-portraits.]

Books

Andrew Piper, Can We Be Wrong: The Problem of Textual Evidence in a Time of Data (Cambridge 2020).

Andrew Piper, Enumerations: Data and Literary Study (Chicago 2018).

Articles

2023

Andrew Piper, Hao Xu, and Eric D. Kolaczyk, “Modeling Narrative Revelation.CHR 2023: Proceedings of the Computational Humanities Research Conference (2023).

Andrew Piper and Sunyam Bagga, “Toward a Data-Driven Theory of Narrativity.” New Literary History 54.1 (2022): 879-901. https://doi.org/10.1353/nlh.2022.a898332.

Andrew Piper and Olivier Toubia, “A quantitative study of non-linearity in storytelling.” Poetics 98 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.poetic.2023.101793

Sil Hamilton and Andrew Piper, “MultiHATHI: A Complete Collection of Multilingual Prose Fiction in the HathiTrust Digital Library.” Journal of Open Humanities Data 9,3 (2023). https://doi.org/10.5334/johd.95

2022

Andrew Piper and Sunyam Bagga, “A Quanititative Study of Fictional Things.” CHR 2022: Proceedings of the Computational Humanities Research Conference (2022).

Sil Hamilton and Andrew Piper, “The COVID That Wasn’t: Counterfactual Journalism Using GPT,” Proceedings of the 6th Joint SIGHUM Workshop on Computational Linguistics for Cultural Heritage, Social Sciences, Humanities and Literature (2022) 83-93.

Andrew Piper, “The CONLIT Dataset of Contemporary Literature.” Journal of Open Humanities Data 8,24 (2022). http://doi.org/10.5334/johd.88

Meehan, Margaret, Dane Malenfant, Andrew Piper. “Causality Mining in Fiction.” Proceedings of the Text2Story’22 Workshop (2022): 25-34.

Benjamin LeBrun, Kaitlyn Todd, and Andrew Piper, “Buying the news: A quantitative study of the effects of corporate acquisition on local news.” New Media & Society (2022).

Sunyam Bagga and Andrew Piper, “HATHI 1M: Introducing a Million Page Historical Prose Dataset in English from the Hathi Trust.Journal of Open Humanities Data 8:7 (2022): 1-10. https://doi.org/10.5334/johd.71

2021

Andrew Piper, Richard Jean So, and David Bamman. “Narrative Theory for Computational Narrative Understanding.” Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), pp. 298-311 (2021).

Andrew Piper, Sunyam Bagga, Laura Monteiro, Andrew Yang, Marie Labrosse, and Yu Lu Liu. “Detecting Narrativity Across Long Time Scales.” CHR 2021: Computational Humanities Research Conference (2021).

Matt Erlin, Andrew Piper, Douglas Knox, Stephen Pentecost, Michaela Drouillard, Brian Powell, and Cienna Townson. “Cultural Capitals: Modeling ‘Minor’ European Literature.” Journal of Cultural Analytics 2 (2021): 40-73. doi: 10.22148/001c.21182

Andrew Piper, “Digitization.” Information: A Historical Companion. Eds. Ann Blair, Paul Duguid, Anja Goeing, and Anthony Grafton (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021) 402-406.

J. Berenike Herrmann, Arthur M. Jacobs, and Andrew Piper. “Computational Stylistics.” Handbook of Empirical Literary Studies(Berlin: de Gruyter, 2021): 451-483.

Samari A., Piper A., Hedley A., Cheriet M. “Weakly Supervised Bounding Box Extraction for Unlabeled Data in Table Detection.” Pattern Recognition. ICPR International Workshops and Challenges (ICPR 2021). doi: 10.1007/978-3-030-68787-8_25

Sunyam Bagga, Andrew Piper, and Derek Ruths. “Are you kidding me? Detecting Unpalatable Questions on Reddit.” In Proceedings of the 16th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Main Volume, pp. 2083-2099 (2021).

2020

Andrew Piper and Chad Wellmon, “The Page Image: Towards a Visual History of Digital Documents,” Book History 23 (2020): 365-397.

Andrew Piper and James Manalad, “Measuring Unreading.” Goethe Yearbook 27 (2020): 233-241.

2019

Stephania DeGaetano-Ortlieb and Andrew Piper, “The Scientization of Literary Studies,” Proceedings of the 3rd Joint SIGHUM Workshop on Computational Linguistics for Cultural Heritage, Social Sciences, Humanities and Literature. (2019): 18-28.

Eve Kraicer and Andrew Piper, “Social Characters: The Hierarchy of Gender in Contemporary English-Language Fiction,” Journal of Cultural Analytics. January 30, 2019. DOI: 10.22148/16.032

Degaetano-Ortlieb, Stefania and Andrew Piper, “The Scientization of Literary Study,” Proceedings of the 3rd Joint SIGHUM Workshop on Computational Linguistics for Cultural Heritage, Social Sciences, Humanities and Literature (2019): 18-28.

2018

Sherif Abuelwafa, Sara Zhalepour, Ehsan Arabnejad, Mohamed Mhiri, Emilienne Greenfield, James P. Ascher, Sofia Bach, Victoria Svaikovsky, Alayne Moody, Andrew Piper, Chad Wellmon, and Mohamed Cheriet, “Detecting Footnotes in 32 million pages of ECCO,” Journal of Cultural Analytics (December 2018). DOI: 10.22148/16.029

Jonathan Sachs and Andrew Piper, “Technique and the Time of Reading,” PMLA 133.5 (2018): 1259-1267.

2017

Andrew Piper, “Think Small: On Literary Modeling.” PMLA 132.3 (2017): 651-658.

Chad Wellmon and Andrew Piper, “Publication, Power and Patronage: On Inequality and Academic Publishing.” Critical Inquiry (July 2017).

Zhalehpour, Sara, Andrew Piper, Chad Wellmon, and Mohamed Cheriet. “Footnote-based document image classification.” International Conference Image Analysis and Recognition, pp. 634-642. Springer, Cham, 2017.

2016

Fei Shu, Larivière V, Mongeon P, Julien C, Piper A, “On the Evolution of Library and Information Science Doctoral Dissertation Topics in North America (1960-2013),” Journal Of Education For Library & Information Science 57.2 (2016): 131-142.

Hardik Vala, Andrew Piper, and Derek Ruths. “The More Antecedents the Merrier: Tackling Multiple Antecedents in Anaphor Resolution.” Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL-2016).

Hardik Vala, Stefan Dimitrov, David Jurgens, Andrew Piper, and Derek Ruths. “Annotating Characters in Literary Corpora: A Scheme, the Charles Tool, and an Annotated Novel.” Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-2016).

Andrew Piper, “Fictionality.” Cultural Analytics (December 2016). DOI: 10.22148/16.011

Andrew Piper and Eva Portelance, “How Cultural Capital Works: Prizewinning Novels, Bestsellers, and the Time of Reading.” Post45 (2016).

2015

Andrew Piper, “Novel Devotions: Conversional Reading, Computational Modeling, and the Modern Novel.” New Literary History 46.1 (2015): 63-98.

Hardik Vala, David Jurgens, Andrew Piper, and Derek Ruths, “Mr. Bennet, his coachman, and the Archbishop walk into a bar but only one of them gets recognized: On The Difficulty of Detecting Characters in Literary Texts.” Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-2015).

Stefan Dimitrov, Faiyaz Zamal, Andrew Piper, and Derek Ruths, “Goodreads vs Amazon: The Effect Of Decoupling Book Reviewing And Book Selling.” Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM-14) 2015.

In the Media

Andrew Piper and Matt Erlin, “Humanities: Let the hypothesis testing begin!” Public Books October 22, 2021.

Chad Wellmon and Andrew Piper, “How the academic elite reproduces itself.” The Chronicle Review, October 13, 2017.

Andrew Piper and Richard Jean So. “Study shows books can bring Republicans and Democrats together.” The Guardian, October 12, 2016.

Andrew Piper and Richard Jean So. “Women Write About Family, Men Write About War: Reviewing Gender Bias in Book Reviews.The New Republic, April 8, 2016.

Richard Jean So and Andrew Piper. “How Has the MFA Changed the Contemporary Novel? A Computational Approach.The Atlantic, March 6, 2016.

Andrew Piper and Richard Jean So. “Quantifying the Weepy Bestseller.” The New Republic, December 18, 2015.