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The representation of mobility in literary narratives has important implications for the cultural understanding of human movement and migration. In this paper, we introduce novel methods for measuring the physical mobility of literary characters through narrative space and time. We capture mobility through geographically defined space, as well as through generic locations such as homes, driveways, and forests. Using a dataset of over 13,000 books published in English since 1789, we observe significant "small world" effects in fictional narratives. Specifically, we find that fictional characters cover far less distance than their non-fictional counterparts; the pathways covered by fictional characters are highly formulaic and limited from a global perspective; and fiction exhibits a distinctive semantic investment in domestic and private places. Surprisingly, we do not find that characters' ascribed gender has a statistically significant effect on distance traveled, but it does influence the semantics of domesticity.
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This content will become publicly available on March 3, 2026
Projecting Characters' Knowledge from Utterances in Narratives
When reading narratives, human readers rely on their Theory of Mind (ToM) to infer not only what the characters know from their utterances, but also whether characters are likely to share common ground. As in human conversation, such decisions are not infallible but probabilistic, based on the evidence available in the narrative. By responding on a scale (rather than Yes/No), humans can indicate commitment to their inferences about what characters know (ToM). We use two prompting approaches to explore (i) how well LLM judgments align with human judgments, and (ii) how well LLMs infer the author’s intent from utterances intended to project knowledge in narratives.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2125295
- PAR ID:
- 10615183
- Publisher / Repository:
- AAAI
- Date Published:
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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