Katrin Rohrbacher: Modeling Fictional Worlds: A Quantitative Approach to Setting

The Department of Digital Humanities and Social Studies would like to invite you to the following talk in our DH Colloquium:

Katrin Rohrbacher: »Modeling Fictional Worlds: A Quantitative Approach to Setting«

Abstract

This talk presents a quantitative approach to the study of fictional worlds through the lens of setting. Drawing on narratological theories of "worldbuilding"—particularly David Herman’s notion of “lived experience in an environment” and Gerhard Hoffmann’s tripartite model of setting—I argue that setting grounds narrative in embodied, spatial experience. Using a manually annotated dataset of 2,800 sentences, I trained a BERT-based multi-class classifier and applied it to over 17 million sentences from 4,700 German-language fictional texts (1780–1940), alongside smaller corpora of canonical literature and nonfiction. My experiments examine setting across five dimensions: historical change, genre differences, canonicity, narrative time, and fiction vs. nonfiction. Results challenge common assumptions: the use of setting does not decline over time, and static visual description plays a comparatively minor role in constructing fictional worlds. This study argues that the vividness of fictional worlds stems not from what is seen, but from what is done in space—emphasizing fiction’s capacity to simulate the processual, reciprocal relation between body and environment.

Further information and other upcoming talks in the Colloquium can be found here.