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Presentation on “Wild Animal Stories: Modeling Anthropomorphism in Animal Writing, 1870-1930”

On March 14th, 2019, Vicky Googasian and Ryan Heuser will present their project, "Wild Animal Stories: Modeling Anthropomorphism in Animal Writing, 1870-1930."

Is an animal a person? The question is far from idle; it is fraught with urgent ethical and legal consequences for animal welfare, and it shapes scientific norms for the study of animal behavior. It also remains a constant theme in Western philosophy from Rene Descartes through present-day Critical Animal Studies. However, lawyers, philosophers, and ethologists are not the only deciders in this question: cultural representations of animals also mediate their relation to personhood. Fiction, for instance, excels in the representation of human individuality, interiority, and action; complex, “round” characters of course populate the long history of prose fiction. How, then, does fiction engage with the personhood of animals? In fiction, when is an animal a character? What do animals do in the pages of fiction? Do they make decisions, have feelings, express interiority? Do animals function more similarly to human characters, or to things, objects, and machines? In this presentation, we will begin to approach these questions with computational methods. In a variety of corpora—from popular natural history to scientific writing about animal behavior to animal-driven fictions historically accused of anthropomorphism—we compare the semantic and syntactic footprints left behind by animals and humans. We discover that, from a computational standpoint, animals in fiction are indeed recognizable as characters, albeit characters more likely to register intentionality through physical movement over speech and to display a mental paradigm colored by instinct and associative learning. Natural history writing, on the other hand, narrates animals in ways that seem surprisingly human-like when compared to animal representations in fiction more broadly. Ultimately, our results suggest the many dimensions of anthropomorphism and the variety of scales at which it operates.