Looking back and forth between Barthes, Sedgwick, and Hirsch trying to interpret a Star Trek scene when I'm 90% sure the explanation is just "the actor had a crush on his costar"

Unsurprising: Using longer words makes female authors more “literary” Surprising: The opposite is true for male authors For more cool plots + findings, take a look at my #CHR2025 paper exploring the role of form vs gender in the classification of genre & literary fiction doi.org/10.63744/Ztw...

I’ll be presenting this work in **2 hours** at EMNLP’s Gather Session 3. Come by to chat about fanfiction, literary notions of similarity, long-context modeling, and consent-focused data collection!

Digital humanities researchers often care about fine-grained similarity based on narrative elements like plot or tone, which don’t necessarily correlate with surface-level textual features. Can embedding models capture this? We study this in the context of fanfiction!