About the Talk:

Fulbright Scholar-in-Residence Mari Hatavara (Tampere University, Finland) will give a public talk titled "Computational Recognition of Narratives: Analyzing Large Datasets with Natural Language Processing" as part of the UT Humanities Center’s “Dialogues” digital humanities mini-series within its 2023-2024 Distinguished Lecture Series.

Narrative is a key resource for mediating experience and making sense of time and change. The study of narratives across time and narrative environments is thus crucial for any discipline working with human action. Moreover, the digitization of large data sets and the computational recognition of key narrative passages has enabled humanities and social sciences experts to target their interpretative efforts more precisely. This talk explores such efforts to extract narratives from two datasets—Finnish parliamentary records (1980–2021) and oral history interviews with former Finnish MPs (1988–2018)—by drawing upon approaches from transdisciplinary narrative studies, the study of political rhetoric and conceptual history, and computational modeling based on linguistic features.

The lecture is free and open to the public and is held in Hodges Library’s auditorium on the UT Knoxville campus. Public parking is available in the Volunteer Hall parking garage for our off-campus visitors. Everyone is welcome!

About the Speaker:

Mari Hatavara is Chair Professor of Finnish Literature and director of Narrare. Centre for Interdisciplinary Narrative Studies at Tampere University, Finland. She has published extensively on interdisciplinary narrative theory and analysis, fictionality studies, narrative minds and voices, intermediality and the poetics of historical fiction and metafiction. She specializes in the analysis of narratives across fictional and non-fictional narrative environments, also with the help of computational approaches to natural language processing. Hatavara is coeditor of The Travelling Concepts of Narrative (2013), Narrative Theory, Literature, and New Media (2015), and special issues on Narrating Selves in Everyday Contexts (Style 2017), Narrating Selves from the Bible to Social Media (Partial Answers 2019) and Real Fictions. Fictionality, Factuality and Narrative Strategies in Contemporary Storytelling (Narrative Inquiry 2019). Currently, she is the consortium PI for the project Political Temporalities. Narrating Continuity and Change in the Finnish Parliament from the Cold War to Covid-19 (funded by Academy of Finland).

About the Series:

The UT Humanities Center's Distinguished Lecture Series brings acclaimed humanities scholars and renowned artists to the Knoxville campus for research-based conversations with UT faculty and graduate students and to give a public talk on a topic of the speaker's choosing. Speakers are nominated and hosted by faculty from our nine affiliated arts and humanities departments. Because only speakers with exceptional records of publication and research activity are eligible to receive a nomination as a visiting scholar, the program brings to campus some of the most cutting-edge and prolific intellectuals in the humanities today. Details on this season's program are available on our website.

Where:

Lindsay Young Auditorium (rm. 101)
John C. Hodges Library
1015 Volunteer Blvd.
Knoxville TN

OR

via livestream at tiny.utk.edu/DLS-Hatavara