Digital Humanities Working Group: Claudia Carroll

^{*Note: The venue for the DH Working Group has changed for Spring 2026. We will now be meeting in the DUC, Room 233, for all sessions until further notice.}

The January session of the Digital Humanities Working Group of Spring 2026 will feature a talk by Dr. Claudia Carroll, TRIADS Postdoctoral Research Associate in Digital Humanities. 

Title: Integrating computational and cognitive literary studies: What happens to realism when we map social cognition in the 19th-century novel?

Abstract: The dominant narrative of the realist novel is one in which the novel, and realism particular, become increasingly interior over the course of the nineteenth century. Cognitive literary critics have challenged this narrative, emphasizing instead the role of representations of the body or social interaction in realism. In this presentation, I present my results using LLM classification to measure differences in novelists use of behavior descriptions and mental content descriptions over the course of the nineteenth century. I argue that while realist novels do contain somewhat more mental content descriptions than their non-realist counterparts, this does not increase over the course of the nineteenth-century. I ultimately argue that the stability of the proportion of behavior to mental state descriptions in characterization across genres and time periods in the nineteenth-century novel points to a fundamental structural convention in the novel as a literary form.

The session will take place on Friday January 23rd, from 11-12.30, in the DUC, Room 233. The presentation will be followed by a Q&A. Lunch will be provided.

If you plan to attend this session, please RSVP and provide your lunch order here.

The Digital Humanities Working Group working is a space for faculty and advanced graduate students to present works-in-progress for feedback before submitting their work to an external conference, journal or grant body. We also aim to create a regular community gathering space for researchers in the digital humanities across disciplines in Arts and Sciences. Scholars interested in any of the subfields of the digital humanities, including but not limited to humanities data analytics, cultural analytics, media studies, critical digital studies, critical data studies, and history of science and technology, are welcome to attend. The group consists of monthly meetings in which one or two faculty or grad students will present a current project. The working group is a cross-disciplinary intitative sponsored by the Transdisciplinary Institute in Applied Data Sciences and the Humanities Digital Workshop, with the support of Olin Library Data Services.

If you wish to be added to the general mailing list for the DH working group, please fill out this form.

If you have any questions, or if you are interested in presenting to the group, please email Claudia Carroll (claudiac@wustl.edu).