Presentation on Personhood

On March 2nd, 2021 we heard an update on the Personhood project's latest work.

The Personhood project is a collection of experiments that investigate the ways that the attributes of personhood are assigned to (or taken away from) literary characters. How are non-human characters (for example, animals or robots) represented so that readers encounter them as persons in the text? And how are human characters sometimes denied attributes of personhood? In this presentation, we will discuss our further extensions of the animacy model from the Wild Animal Stories project, in which we use a machine learning model trained on the grammar of humans and objects to classify entities that do not exactly belong to either category (e.g. organizations, occupations, or abstractions), and we will present our latest results from our analysis of online educational resources that offer their own complex topology of characters in a large literary corpus.