Experiential Narrativity in Political Talk. Bringing together Computational Recognition and Narrative Theory

Renowned Finnish narrative scholar Mari Hatavara will give a lecture on the use of narrative in politics. Narrative is a basic means to understand and communicate human action, experientiality and temporal change, and therefore a powerful tool for persuasion. Nevertheless, narratives are used sparsely in the Finnish parliament, and they are often short, intertwined with argumentation and oriented towards the future. In order to study the occurrences and functions of narratives in plenary speeches, they must first be identified within a large volume of parliamentary records data. This talk explores such efforts to extract narratives from Finnish parliamentary records (1980–2023) by drawing upon approaches from interdisciplinary narrative theory and computational modeling based on linguistic features. Particular focus is on verbs that portray human experientiality, which are understood as central in narratives. Modeling complex concepts such as narrative creates new possibilities for humanities and computer sciences cooperation in natural language processing.

This event is organised by the Arts, Narrative and Cognition Theme group of the Centre for Arts in Society.