The goal of this project is to generate knowledge about the behaviour of literary characters at large scale and make this data openly available to the public. Characters are the scaffolding of great storytelling. This Zooniverse project will allow us to crowdsource data to train AI models to better understand who characters are and what they do within diverse narrative worlds to answer one very big question: why do human beings tell stories?

 

In the nineteenth-century heyday of the novel, there were over 1.5 million literary characters invented just in English alone. Today, with the continued growth of literary markets around the world and the explosion of creative writing on the internet through fan communities, that number is orders of magnitude higher.

 

How on earth can we possibly understand all of this creativity?

 

This is where you, the reader, come in. We need your help to build better, more transparent AI models to understand human storytelling. To be clear: our goal is not to build AI to generate stories or create smarter chatbots. Our aim is fundamentally academic: we want to develop models to help us understand stories and thus learn more about this essential human activity. Most AI development is happening inside of black boxes behind closed doors. Our models will be open to the public as will all of the annotations made by readers like you. You are a key participant in how we will understand the future of stories.

 

For this first task, all of our data is drawn from a collection of contemporary fiction spanning numerous different genres, from bestsellers to prizewinners to mysteries to romances to scifi.