WEBVTT 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:13.840 So, things I want to talk about today is this. 00:00:13.840 --> 00:00:19.620 Storytelling in digital humanities and people who know me will know I will always talk about 00:00:19.620 --> 00:00:21.120 fiction as well. 00:00:21.120 --> 00:00:26.820 So even real world stuff for me is very much connected to fiction. 00:00:27.220 --> 00:00:31.620 I'm one of the people who does a bit more fundamental stuff today. 00:00:31.620 --> 00:00:36.740 So just reflecting a little bit on when we talk about digital humanities, what is it 00:00:36.740 --> 00:00:38.040 we actually mean? 00:00:38.040 --> 00:00:41.640 Because there are so many things we can do in digital humanities. 00:00:41.640 --> 00:00:49.860 So we can archive stuff, what we do can be about preserving things, making stuff accessible. 00:00:49.860 --> 00:00:55.100 And here, for instance, this is a manuscript that Charles Dickens wrote, and manuscripts 00:00:55.180 --> 00:01:01.380 are very precious things that we want to conserve, and therefore digitalisation is a very important 00:01:01.380 --> 00:01:02.380 bit. 00:01:02.380 --> 00:01:05.060 But just archiving, preserving isn't enough. 00:01:05.060 --> 00:01:08.560 We also then need to study what's going on. 00:01:08.560 --> 00:01:12.940 And it's about creating as well, and experiencing. 00:01:12.940 --> 00:01:18.220 So here the example of the 3D printing is that sometimes when you go to museums, it's 00:01:18.220 --> 00:01:24.140 all nice and well if everything is behind glass, but it's also about experiencing. 00:01:24.180 --> 00:01:30.500 And so some of the digital methods that we have can help us experience reality in a new 00:01:30.500 --> 00:01:31.500 way. 00:01:31.500 --> 00:01:35.140 It's also about understanding the history on something I only learned recently in our 00:01:35.140 --> 00:01:36.940 Rechenzentrum here. 00:01:36.940 --> 00:01:40.340 We actually have an old Zuse computer. 00:01:40.340 --> 00:01:42.260 And you can go there and look. 00:01:42.260 --> 00:01:44.620 Yeah, we will go and have a look at this. 00:01:44.620 --> 00:01:45.820 Absolutely. 00:01:45.820 --> 00:01:50.620 And the very nice person who looks after that machine is very happy if we come and have 00:01:50.620 --> 00:01:52.500 a look and get a little demonstration. 00:01:52.500 --> 00:01:53.620 So this is so cool. 00:01:54.100 --> 00:01:57.020 So anyway, this is happening here as well. 00:01:57.020 --> 00:02:03.820 Now my focus in digital humanities is very much on language and data and how language 00:02:03.820 --> 00:02:09.260 can be data and what data really is, linguistic data and all of that. 00:02:09.260 --> 00:02:13.060 And that seems to be a very fashionable thing to do these days. 00:02:13.060 --> 00:02:14.060 Everything is about data. 00:02:14.060 --> 00:02:18.820 And what you then get an awful lot is people now talk about storytelling when it comes 00:02:18.820 --> 00:02:19.820 to data. 00:02:19.820 --> 00:02:22.660 And then you see there are things like this. 00:02:22.700 --> 00:02:26.820 You probably might have seen something like this where people say, OK, data science, what 00:02:26.820 --> 00:02:32.020 we do there is we collect data, we prepare data, then we visualize it, we analyze it, 00:02:32.020 --> 00:02:35.980 and then we need to tell a story with our data. 00:02:35.980 --> 00:02:37.460 I think this is a good argument. 00:02:37.460 --> 00:02:41.700 Yes, if you don't have a story, you can't explain much to people. 00:02:41.700 --> 00:02:47.980 But I think what we shouldn't forget is if we take a humanities perspective, the data 00:02:48.020 --> 00:02:53.580 we looked at already had a story before we turned it into data. 00:02:53.580 --> 00:02:58.300 And then we kind of pretend that it's just data, a lot of collection, and then afterwards 00:02:58.300 --> 00:03:02.820 we look at it and think, how am I going to tell a story with the graphs that I now have? 00:03:02.820 --> 00:03:08.540 And what I want to argue is that we need to make that connection clearer. 00:03:08.540 --> 00:03:13.900 So stories don't just turn into data and then you forget the context. 00:03:13.900 --> 00:03:16.880 We need to look at that context as well. 00:03:16.880 --> 00:03:21.560 So here are some things I just want to leave with you in the fundamental section. 00:03:21.560 --> 00:03:25.800 When we talk about writing, writing is not the same as text production. 00:03:25.800 --> 00:03:30.280 And I will say a little bit about Chet GPT obviously at the end as well. 00:03:30.280 --> 00:03:33.680 Also reading is not the same as knowledge extraction. 00:03:33.680 --> 00:03:38.820 It isn't just about can I summarize this text and know what the three key messages are. 00:03:38.820 --> 00:03:45.600 Reading is also a process that does lots of other things than coming up with a summary. 00:03:45.600 --> 00:03:49.140 There's always creativity and criticality involved. 00:03:49.140 --> 00:03:55.640 So you have the difference between product that might turn into data and process of actually 00:03:55.640 --> 00:03:59.960 engaging with it as a human being for all sorts of other benefits. 00:03:59.960 --> 00:04:06.720 So what I want to argue is we still need theoretical foundations and we also still need qualitative 00:04:06.720 --> 00:04:11.480 analysis, however many computers we have and however many programs we can apply. 00:04:11.480 --> 00:04:16.360 And what I want to talk about today is basically three principles of creativity. 00:04:16.360 --> 00:04:21.080 So that is a bit like stuff that I would do in Introduction to Digital Humanities week 00:04:21.080 --> 00:04:27.640 one and two, but very quickly today in less than half an hour hopefully. 00:04:27.640 --> 00:04:34.560 A good example for this is to take a text that everyone or a lot of people know, so 00:04:34.560 --> 00:04:39.560 you won't be surprised if you just look at this for a tiny little moment. 00:04:39.640 --> 00:04:45.400 If we look at that text, some words that are interesting to count and look at are unsurprisingly 00:04:45.400 --> 00:04:52.560 words like witch, which here from the Oxford English Dictionary when you want to look at 00:04:52.560 --> 00:04:59.600 the definition is a female magician, a sorceress, and the later use especially a woman supposed 00:04:59.600 --> 00:05:03.040 to have dealings with the devil or evil spirits. 00:05:03.040 --> 00:05:05.160 Okay, that's an interesting one. 00:05:05.160 --> 00:05:12.520 If we look at the male counterpart, we have a wise man. 00:05:12.520 --> 00:05:19.800 Slightly evaluative, little bit different in terms of, you know, no comment. 00:05:19.800 --> 00:05:27.160 But what's interesting is if we now look at this in general language and my go-to place 00:05:27.160 --> 00:05:30.120 for general language is always the British National Corpus. 00:05:30.120 --> 00:05:34.880 So this is taken from the older version but there's a newer version as well and it doesn't 00:05:34.880 --> 00:05:36.480 change much. 00:05:36.480 --> 00:05:40.440 If you look at the British National Corpus and you count all the occurrences of wizard 00:05:40.440 --> 00:05:48.280 and witch, you will find that put together the percentage for the female form is more 00:05:48.280 --> 00:05:51.440 frequent than the male form. 00:05:51.440 --> 00:05:56.480 And that's to have something to do with the fact that we've got this little bit of evaluative 00:05:56.480 --> 00:05:58.880 meaning going on here. 00:05:58.880 --> 00:06:03.920 Okay, if we then look at the corpus, this is a bit small but I explain what it is, that 00:06:03.960 --> 00:06:09.760 is the Oxford Corpus of children's literature and children's literature published after 00:06:09.760 --> 00:06:10.760 2000. 00:06:10.760 --> 00:06:14.720 So we did some work with the University of Oxford where they've got this Oxford Corpus 00:06:14.720 --> 00:06:18.240 and it's just, you know, the stuff that you can buy in Waterstones. 00:06:18.240 --> 00:06:24.840 And if you look at that, it's also that somehow witches are better for fictional stories than 00:06:24.840 --> 00:06:26.580 wizards. 00:06:26.580 --> 00:06:31.480 And if you go further back in history, in 19th century, even more so. 00:06:31.480 --> 00:06:33.560 Okay, so we see there's a bit of a change. 00:06:34.200 --> 00:06:38.400 You know, older stories, more witches, more recent, less so. 00:06:38.400 --> 00:06:43.880 And you can also then relate this if you just look at the pronouns in these books and see 00:06:43.880 --> 00:06:47.160 is there maybe a gendered relationship as well. 00:06:47.160 --> 00:06:52.720 And we've used the pronouns kind of as proxies for male and female characters of people. 00:06:52.720 --> 00:07:01.920 And then you see that it turns round, you know, so there you have more male people characters 00:07:02.080 --> 00:07:07.080 and fewer female people, but you have more witches than wizards. 00:07:07.080 --> 00:07:09.320 Well, what does that say? 00:07:09.320 --> 00:07:13.840 Anyway, now here my first fundamental thing, three principles of creativity. 00:07:13.840 --> 00:07:17.200 The first one is the principle of minimal departure. 00:07:17.200 --> 00:07:22.360 When you deal with fiction, we assume that unless the text tells us otherwise, the fictional 00:07:22.360 --> 00:07:26.920 world is like the real world because we can't spell out everything in the fictional story. 00:07:26.920 --> 00:07:29.240 We need to make some assumptions. 00:07:29.240 --> 00:07:34.240 And what I just showed you about these pronouns, people talk about men more than they talk 00:07:34.240 --> 00:07:40.040 about women that has something to do with how we see the world. 00:07:40.040 --> 00:07:44.800 So all the biases that we have in the real world, we very easily get them in fiction 00:07:44.800 --> 00:07:45.800 as well. 00:07:45.800 --> 00:07:51.000 So the argument is that by looking at more than one fictional world, we see evidence 00:07:51.000 --> 00:07:56.240 of the real world because we just take the patterns from the real world into fiction. 00:07:57.200 --> 00:08:00.520 Why do I need all this to talk about Harry Potter? 00:08:00.520 --> 00:08:07.320 If you look at Harry Potter, suddenly wizard is more frequent than witch. 00:08:07.320 --> 00:08:09.720 Now you can think about why might this be so? 00:08:09.720 --> 00:08:12.480 Why do we now have wizards? 00:08:12.480 --> 00:08:16.280 What's happening there? 00:08:16.280 --> 00:08:17.440 Any ideas? 00:08:17.440 --> 00:08:23.020 If you look at the pronouns, it all becomes clear that they're exactly the same. 00:08:23.500 --> 00:08:27.740 The male characters are more frequent than the female characters. 00:08:27.740 --> 00:08:31.700 What it is in Harry Potter is just that you build this whole Harry Potter world of the 00:08:31.700 --> 00:08:33.340 wizards and witches. 00:08:33.340 --> 00:08:36.260 And basically that world works exactly in the same way. 00:08:36.260 --> 00:08:39.900 Obviously, the men are more frequently talked about than the women. 00:08:39.900 --> 00:08:45.660 And if you look at concordances, you see the wizard is always the person who's the greatest, 00:08:45.660 --> 00:08:46.660 the most powerful. 00:08:46.660 --> 00:08:48.740 You know, with the men, it's about that. 00:08:48.740 --> 00:08:54.060 And if we look at the witches, witches are mothers, as we would expect. 00:08:54.060 --> 00:08:59.100 And then they read this top notch literature like Witch Weekly, which is a bit like, OK, 00:08:59.100 --> 00:09:00.820 magazine or something like that. 00:09:00.820 --> 00:09:03.020 You know, so no stereotypes spared. 00:09:03.020 --> 00:09:04.020 Yeah. 00:09:04.020 --> 00:09:08.020 But just showing you this for these principles. 00:09:08.020 --> 00:09:14.260 Now what I'm arguing is that you can also still change the world with fiction. 00:09:14.260 --> 00:09:15.660 We don't need to accept this. 00:09:15.660 --> 00:09:18.300 It depends on what we do with this. 00:09:18.460 --> 00:09:24.180 These gendered patterns are patterns that are negotiated in the language. 00:09:24.180 --> 00:09:25.180 OK? 00:09:25.180 --> 00:09:30.260 Patterns have to do with evaluative meaning and bias. 00:09:30.260 --> 00:09:33.340 And patterns occur in fiction. 00:09:33.340 --> 00:09:38.740 Fiction is the place where we negotiate meanings because we can think about things that could 00:09:38.740 --> 00:09:41.620 hypothetically take place. 00:09:41.620 --> 00:09:46.740 If you look at children's literature, there's a lot about how you should represent more 00:09:46.780 --> 00:09:50.580 diverse families, how you deal with people from different backgrounds. 00:09:50.580 --> 00:09:52.020 There's a lot of thinking going on. 00:09:52.020 --> 00:09:56.420 And we looked with some colleagues at these books here. 00:09:56.420 --> 00:09:57.460 Does anyone know these? 00:09:57.460 --> 00:10:01.580 Murder Most Unladenlike in the UK is the absolute craze at the moment. 00:10:01.580 --> 00:10:04.500 That is Robin Stevens and everyone. 00:10:04.500 --> 00:10:09.380 You know, if you've got kids in the UK, you must have these books. 00:10:09.380 --> 00:10:13.020 So what it is, it's kind of obviously boarding school story. 00:10:13.020 --> 00:10:16.460 But this time it's two girls who are detectives. 00:10:16.500 --> 00:10:25.100 And the whole book and the whole series is really about these girls behaving in a very 00:10:25.100 --> 00:10:29.420 tough way, solving these murder mysteries. 00:10:29.420 --> 00:10:34.140 If you look at the Murder Most Unladenlike, these are the figures for the pronouns again. 00:10:34.140 --> 00:10:39.900 There, the world is actually changed and turned into something else because now you have more 00:10:39.900 --> 00:10:40.900 female characters. 00:10:40.900 --> 00:10:44.820 So the female pronouns, 68% versus the male pronouns. 00:10:44.820 --> 00:10:49.140 So here you have a really female world. 00:10:49.140 --> 00:10:56.500 And then you have texts, text sections that talk about these characters in a way that 00:10:56.500 --> 00:11:04.220 really stress these gendered situations, stereotypes, things that want to be changed. 00:11:04.220 --> 00:11:09.500 So here's a typical example because we looked at the word unladenlike because that's part 00:11:09.500 --> 00:11:13.500 of the title and we thought, why is this an interesting word to look at? 00:11:13.740 --> 00:11:20.580 And if you look at unladenlike in general language, again, you get so much, you learn 00:11:20.580 --> 00:11:28.060 so much about stereotypes and how people think women should behave, sit, walk, think, dress. 00:11:28.060 --> 00:11:29.060 It is amazing. 00:11:29.060 --> 00:11:31.980 I mean, if you look at all this, you don't want to get up in the morning anymore because 00:11:31.980 --> 00:11:33.620 it's just so complex. 00:11:33.620 --> 00:11:38.860 But here in the book, you then have things where the book always makes a point of they 00:11:38.860 --> 00:11:43.100 do something and that is decidedly unladenlike. 00:11:43.100 --> 00:11:44.860 And that is positive. 00:11:44.860 --> 00:11:48.180 So doing stuff in an unladenlike way is good. 00:11:48.180 --> 00:11:50.220 So here we've got something. 00:11:50.220 --> 00:11:53.620 They just have a really great insight into who it might be. 00:11:53.620 --> 00:11:59.740 And here you see they also said what she would have called Sherlock-y, so from Sherlock Holmes. 00:11:59.740 --> 00:12:04.660 So they always use things that are typically male to describe what great achievements they 00:12:04.660 --> 00:12:05.660 come up with. 00:12:05.660 --> 00:12:09.620 And then at some point she said Daisy said something extremely unladenlike. 00:12:09.860 --> 00:12:16.100 Obviously the book is PC, so you don't hear what she said, but it was extremely unladenlike. 00:12:16.100 --> 00:12:19.060 So you can imagine which words this might have been. 00:12:19.060 --> 00:12:21.520 So the unladenlike is a point we want to make. 00:12:21.520 --> 00:12:28.420 And that is the second principle of creativity that sometimes in the text, you highlight 00:12:28.420 --> 00:12:33.100 parts of the text that receive more emphasis than others. 00:12:33.100 --> 00:12:37.980 And this textual highlighting creates some psychological foregrounding. 00:12:37.980 --> 00:12:43.620 So this is a story where really the gender topic, you can't easily escape this. 00:12:43.620 --> 00:12:47.740 And you have these little parts in the text where something is really highlighted for 00:12:47.740 --> 00:12:49.220 you to not miss it. 00:12:49.220 --> 00:12:55.500 Anyway, the next principle I want to show you is something I need to prepare a bit. 00:12:55.500 --> 00:13:01.300 And that is stories are generally about people. 00:13:01.300 --> 00:13:05.940 We have, again, in children's books, we have stories where animals are the protagonists, 00:13:05.940 --> 00:13:09.340 but then, funnily enough, these animals always behave like people. 00:13:09.340 --> 00:13:12.500 So really stories are about people. 00:13:12.500 --> 00:13:16.740 And there are typical ways of talking about people and describing people. 00:13:16.740 --> 00:13:20.760 And body language is a very common ingredient of fiction. 00:13:20.760 --> 00:13:26.460 So now I want to say something about patterns that are common and typical and repeated. 00:13:26.460 --> 00:13:30.140 And people who normally will know there's no way of saying this without talking about 00:13:31.140 --> 00:13:36.540 that is the web app that we've developed, especially for the study of fiction. 00:13:36.540 --> 00:13:37.900 And I won't go into the details. 00:13:37.900 --> 00:13:41.700 It has lots of functionalities, but we don't need the functionalities here. 00:13:41.700 --> 00:13:46.700 I just wanted to see if you've got a mobile device that is connected to the internet, 00:13:46.700 --> 00:13:49.880 we could just together quickly look at an example. 00:13:49.880 --> 00:13:57.940 If you go to click bmac.uk, our mobile friendly version, if there is enough Wi Fi to actually 00:13:57.940 --> 00:14:06.420 do this, if you go to the click bmac.uk, you should see something like this. 00:14:06.420 --> 00:14:07.860 Is that something you can see? 00:14:07.860 --> 00:14:08.860 If anyone can see? 00:14:08.860 --> 00:14:10.740 I see Anastasia is nodding. 00:14:10.740 --> 00:14:12.980 That is good. 00:14:12.980 --> 00:14:14.980 People in the back, anyone? 00:14:14.980 --> 00:14:15.980 Yeah, yeah. 00:14:15.980 --> 00:14:19.700 People in front are nodding because then if you click on this little box up here, you 00:14:19.700 --> 00:14:21.260 then get these options. 00:14:21.260 --> 00:14:22.260 Yeah. 00:14:22.260 --> 00:14:25.140 The little, yeah, that little box. 00:14:25.820 --> 00:14:26.820 Yeah. 00:14:26.820 --> 00:14:30.380 This little box, yeah. 00:14:30.380 --> 00:14:34.940 You then get options and of these options, I want you to click on concordance. 00:14:34.940 --> 00:14:39.860 And then in the concordance, please go to the search, the corpora, then you get a little 00:14:39.860 --> 00:14:46.660 drop down and you just tick Dickens' novels. 00:14:46.660 --> 00:14:53.060 And then you put in for the search term, the word hands. 00:14:53.060 --> 00:14:55.500 And then it depends on how your phone works. 00:14:55.500 --> 00:14:57.820 For some phones, you just have to click refresh. 00:14:57.820 --> 00:15:03.460 For others, you have to do other things, but you know your phone, how you make it do. 00:15:03.460 --> 00:15:07.900 Can you see it, love? 00:15:07.900 --> 00:15:12.580 And it doesn't just talk to the person sitting next to you if you're unsure. 00:15:12.580 --> 00:15:15.380 Does it work? 00:15:15.380 --> 00:15:17.140 I see some people smiling. 00:15:17.140 --> 00:15:20.260 Is that desperation or does it mean it works? 00:15:20.260 --> 00:15:21.260 It's okay. 00:15:21.260 --> 00:15:22.260 Okay. 00:15:22.260 --> 00:15:25.180 So you can see then something like this. 00:15:25.180 --> 00:15:26.180 Yeah. 00:15:26.180 --> 00:15:31.620 And that is what we call a concordance or similar to what I showed you for wizard and 00:15:31.620 --> 00:15:32.780 witch. 00:15:32.780 --> 00:15:39.020 And this is just a sequence of occurrences of the word hands in Charles Dickens. 00:15:39.020 --> 00:15:41.220 And these occur in the order of the book. 00:15:41.220 --> 00:15:47.340 And then we have some other fancy functions where you can, for example, quick group and 00:15:47.820 --> 00:15:54.900 say I want to see which possessives are in front of or are occurring after the hands 00:15:54.900 --> 00:15:56.140 or something like this. 00:15:56.140 --> 00:15:58.220 And then you can see patterns. 00:15:58.220 --> 00:16:05.380 And the reason why I've used the word hands is there are patterns that occur really repeatedly, 00:16:05.380 --> 00:16:12.140 not just in one Dickens novel, not just in Charles Dickens, but across fiction. 00:16:12.140 --> 00:16:16.420 And a typical pattern is putting his hands in his pockets. 00:16:16.940 --> 00:16:19.980 So putting his hands in his pockets is like something like this. 00:16:19.980 --> 00:16:25.580 And that is typical male behavior in a lot of fictional texts. 00:16:25.580 --> 00:16:32.800 And what I wanted to illustrate with this little example is the third principle of creativity. 00:16:32.800 --> 00:16:37.020 So creativity needs convention as well. 00:16:37.020 --> 00:16:44.300 So because the language is so patterned, both on lexicogrammatical level and larger levels, 00:16:44.300 --> 00:16:50.140 we need texts to contextualize with other texts. 00:16:50.140 --> 00:16:56.700 So we need to spell out what we've already read or heard somewhere else. 00:16:56.700 --> 00:17:04.260 Because otherwise, your text will sound extremely weird if you don't make these contextualizing 00:17:04.260 --> 00:17:07.340 patterns in fiction that you write. 00:17:07.340 --> 00:17:08.420 Okay? 00:17:08.420 --> 00:17:13.940 So I hope this is okay for the principles, because now I'll show you a few more examples. 00:17:14.340 --> 00:17:20.460 Going back to some of the stuff we have done in children's fiction, where we looked at 00:17:20.460 --> 00:17:25.580 that corpus, the one on the left is the Chile Corpus, so that's 19th century corpus of children's 00:17:25.580 --> 00:17:26.580 fiction. 00:17:26.580 --> 00:17:31.020 So this is the classics, you know, Beatrix Potter, Alice in Wonderland, the stuff that 00:17:31.020 --> 00:17:33.900 we all know and somehow have grown up with. 00:17:33.900 --> 00:17:39.400 And the other one is the OCC, that is the 2000 onwards Oxford Children's Corpus. 00:17:39.400 --> 00:17:42.860 And for me, this was very interesting, because that's the stuff I've read with my son. 00:17:42.860 --> 00:17:47.860 So the one is the one that I grew up with somehow, because it was the classics then, 00:17:47.860 --> 00:17:52.300 and the other one is the stuff that I've been reading now as a parent, which is very interesting 00:17:52.300 --> 00:17:53.300 in itself. 00:17:53.300 --> 00:17:59.300 So what we then did is we said we wanted to find common patterns, repeated patterns, and 00:17:59.300 --> 00:18:01.840 especially the body language common patterns. 00:18:01.840 --> 00:18:06.300 So we did something that was super easy, and I'm giving this example because you will know 00:18:06.300 --> 00:18:07.300 all this. 00:18:07.300 --> 00:18:12.180 You know, Google Ngram Viewer is something that was hyped when it came out, and I think 00:18:12.500 --> 00:18:17.020 since then everyone really knows what Ngrams are, so repeated sequences of words. 00:18:17.020 --> 00:18:23.140 And we wanted to just look at all of them that had possessives in them, so things like 00:18:23.140 --> 00:18:28.060 his hands in his pockets, his face with his hands, covered his face with his. 00:18:28.060 --> 00:18:33.140 So we really just checked what sequences of five words can we find, where we've got body 00:18:33.140 --> 00:18:39.980 part nouns and possessives, so that we can do a little comparison as to female characters 00:18:39.980 --> 00:18:40.980 and male characters. 00:18:40.980 --> 00:18:41.980 One second. 00:18:42.780 --> 00:18:50.180 So we wanted to compare female and male characters, and we also wanted to compare how things 00:18:50.180 --> 00:18:52.540 change over time. 00:18:52.540 --> 00:18:59.020 So what we found is basically in the 19th century fiction, and I can't show you all 00:18:59.020 --> 00:19:06.320 of this, it's more that female characters are very much defined in relation to male 00:19:06.320 --> 00:19:07.620 characters. 00:19:08.260 --> 00:19:15.780 So they throw their arms around other people's neck, or they do things where they grab other 00:19:15.780 --> 00:19:17.620 people or they look at them. 00:19:17.620 --> 00:19:24.300 It's really more in relation to, and otherwise you have things like with tears in her eyes 00:19:24.300 --> 00:19:27.140 or covered her face with her hands or something. 00:19:27.140 --> 00:19:28.740 You see where this is going. 00:19:28.740 --> 00:19:33.660 Whereas men are very much like his hands in his pockets and doing things that are really 00:19:33.660 --> 00:19:37.140 like, you know, everything's possible. 00:19:37.660 --> 00:19:45.300 If you then look at the more contemporary, you see that this kind of changes, and the 00:19:45.300 --> 00:19:49.460 patterns we found that this is important, we just didn't look at these sequences. 00:19:49.460 --> 00:19:56.100 We also looked at a lot of the context, because context explains the meaning of the pattern. 00:19:56.100 --> 00:20:02.460 And you could then see that there was behavior of female characters, so the top frequent 00:20:02.460 --> 00:20:06.540 one is something where female characters stand like this. 00:20:06.940 --> 00:20:12.020 And then the context describes that these female characters are very self-confident, 00:20:12.020 --> 00:20:15.140 and they're really having a go at the person they are talking to. 00:20:15.140 --> 00:20:19.740 So it's not like they put their face behind their hands and don't want to speak to them. 00:20:19.740 --> 00:20:23.180 So it's kind of, you can see how this is a bit different. 00:20:23.180 --> 00:20:29.400 Then you all know this, then there was a time in psychology where people then started talking 00:20:29.400 --> 00:20:33.340 about the Wonder Woman pose and something as a power pose. 00:20:33.340 --> 00:20:37.700 I mean, this is now old news, I don't think we do this as much anymore, but there are 00:20:37.700 --> 00:20:41.140 different power poses for men and for women. 00:20:41.140 --> 00:20:45.620 So if you look something like this, James Bond, he wouldn't stand like this. 00:20:45.620 --> 00:20:48.160 Imagine Daniel Craig like, seriously, no. 00:20:48.160 --> 00:20:54.260 But then you also have later Wonder Woman, which is a bit different from early Wonder 00:20:54.260 --> 00:20:55.260 Woman. 00:20:55.260 --> 00:20:57.420 So there's a lot of interesting stuff going on there. 00:20:57.420 --> 00:21:01.740 What I like most is that people then also talk about real world situations. 00:21:02.140 --> 00:21:04.420 I don't know whether you remember Theresa May. 00:21:04.420 --> 00:21:09.420 She was one of the many prime ministers we lived through in the UK, and at some point 00:21:09.420 --> 00:21:15.540 she really wanted to present herself as this, you know, I've now got the house in order. 00:21:15.540 --> 00:21:19.780 And then obviously the press, as the press would do, mock this immediately. 00:21:19.780 --> 00:21:24.740 Oh, Theresa May appeared to go for a spot of power posing here, and then obviously with 00:21:24.740 --> 00:21:26.780 the comment, and it didn't really help. 00:21:26.780 --> 00:21:31.500 And then you had people like here, David Cameron, that's a really good one. 00:21:31.500 --> 00:21:37.180 It says that then Prime Minister David Cameron went full East End gang boss at the photo 00:21:37.180 --> 00:21:38.180 shoot. 00:21:38.180 --> 00:21:45.020 So I don't know if, this is now a bit of a UK joke, but Gavin, you probably might have 00:21:45.020 --> 00:21:46.660 watched East Enders at some point. 00:21:46.660 --> 00:21:53.300 I definitely have, and East Enders is really, you know, when you see him there, it almost 00:21:53.300 --> 00:21:56.820 looks like, you know, Phil or Grant Mitchell or something like this. 00:21:56.820 --> 00:21:59.220 You just cannot see it somehow. 00:21:59.220 --> 00:22:02.380 But the press is very good at making fun of these things. 00:22:02.380 --> 00:22:07.260 Anyway, what I want to say is that there's quite a lot of connection between what you 00:22:07.260 --> 00:22:12.180 have in fiction and what you have in the real world, either because fiction shows you what 00:22:12.180 --> 00:22:16.740 happens in the real world, or the real world might then make fun of what you have in fiction 00:22:16.740 --> 00:22:18.140 to do other things. 00:22:18.140 --> 00:22:21.700 And this is one I can't talk about, I'll just give this to you in case you want to look 00:22:21.700 --> 00:22:22.700 at this. 00:22:22.700 --> 00:22:27.140 There was a really nice article in The Conversation where they talked about spies are not who 00:22:27.140 --> 00:22:28.940 you think they are. 00:22:28.940 --> 00:22:32.580 And that is interesting in the sense, what do we know about spies? 00:22:32.580 --> 00:22:39.060 A lot of what we think spies are is because we all, many of us, do watch James Bond movies 00:22:39.060 --> 00:22:40.500 and enjoy this very much. 00:22:40.500 --> 00:22:44.660 So we learn about the world also from fiction. 00:22:44.660 --> 00:22:49.460 So it's not just that the world is reflected in fiction, but we learn about stuff that 00:22:49.460 --> 00:22:52.980 we don't have direct access to through fiction. 00:22:53.980 --> 00:22:59.980 Now I just want to use the last couple of minutes to talk a little bit about how we 00:22:59.980 --> 00:23:07.100 get from these principles that help us to describe what we find in our data. 00:23:07.100 --> 00:23:13.540 So the principle of minimal departure, highlighting and contextualizing, these are good principles 00:23:13.540 --> 00:23:16.940 to analyze data and texts. 00:23:16.940 --> 00:23:22.260 And what I'm currently very interested in is how do we get from the understanding of 00:23:22.540 --> 00:23:26.980 text and the analysis of text to the actual production of text? 00:23:26.980 --> 00:23:34.940 And how can the patterns that we have identified help us learn to write better or become a 00:23:34.940 --> 00:23:37.140 novelist should we want to do this? 00:23:37.140 --> 00:23:40.620 And that's a little project that I've also been doing with other colleagues that we've 00:23:40.620 --> 00:23:42.780 called then Click Creative. 00:23:42.780 --> 00:23:47.260 And you see we've already changed the font size to make it look more creative, but yeah. 00:23:48.260 --> 00:23:53.540 What we're doing there is we're developing training materials where we use these insights 00:23:53.540 --> 00:23:59.100 like things like his hands in his pockets or her hands on her hips to actually then 00:23:59.100 --> 00:24:04.780 prepare materials and especially for children who learn how to write stories to say these 00:24:04.780 --> 00:24:08.940 are things maybe you should be aware of or give them little examples and say if someone 00:24:08.940 --> 00:24:11.180 stands like this, what does this look like? 00:24:11.180 --> 00:24:12.180 What do you think? 00:24:12.180 --> 00:24:16.060 What emotion is meant to be expressed in this way? 00:24:16.860 --> 00:24:23.060 We then use our concordances as a way of zooming in, so kind of doing a bit of focused reading. 00:24:23.060 --> 00:24:27.620 So saying I write a story where I want to write descriptions of eyes or so on. 00:24:27.620 --> 00:24:31.940 And it's very helpful to run a concordance on eyes and see what actually happens to then 00:24:31.940 --> 00:24:35.420 get a sense of how could we maybe do this? 00:24:35.420 --> 00:24:38.100 We then also give them little examples. 00:24:38.100 --> 00:24:42.740 The important thing for me to mention is it is a portfolio approach. 00:24:42.740 --> 00:24:49.620 So we are not trying to develop something like these AI writing tools that basically 00:24:49.620 --> 00:24:55.300 do the job for you, but it's more like you need a set of different things, examples, 00:24:55.300 --> 00:24:59.620 skills, practices, and this is what we're trying to put into our portfolio. 00:24:59.620 --> 00:25:05.540 If you have time, we've also done some little videos that you can watch and this is the 00:25:05.540 --> 00:25:07.660 kind of handouts we prepare. 00:25:07.660 --> 00:25:14.300 This was an interesting one where we looked at how do we actually talk about light in 00:25:14.300 --> 00:25:15.580 fiction? 00:25:15.580 --> 00:25:20.540 Do we describe light in terms of what we see? 00:25:20.540 --> 00:25:24.600 So do we think light is a very visual thing? 00:25:24.600 --> 00:25:29.580 But actually light is something that you also hear and describe. 00:25:29.580 --> 00:25:35.380 A lot of the importance of light in fiction is the audio of it, kind of, you know, like 00:25:35.860 --> 00:25:42.020 lighting a match, hearing the fire in the background, having an old oil lamp where the 00:25:42.020 --> 00:25:45.460 sound is somehow different from electric light. 00:25:45.460 --> 00:25:50.620 So these are things that we want to use to help teach creative writing and then we do 00:25:50.620 --> 00:25:55.180 stuff like this where we actually speak to authors who do write fiction. 00:25:55.180 --> 00:25:59.580 So we've done an interview with Essie Fox who's just done a really brilliant book, if 00:25:59.580 --> 00:26:03.900 you're into like gothic stuff, that kind of thing, and then talk about authors, how do 00:26:03.980 --> 00:26:08.140 you actually learn and do these things? 00:26:08.140 --> 00:26:13.660 Now I want to show you, I do have two more minutes, yeah, I want to show you just one 00:26:13.660 --> 00:26:19.540 example of the stuff that we are currently trying to work on in this whole Click Creative 00:26:19.540 --> 00:26:26.540 because you can't help doing stuff, so this is just the handouts quickly, I want to get 00:26:26.540 --> 00:26:29.740 to the next thing, so that's all the stuff that you can download. 00:26:29.740 --> 00:26:34.540 But you can't do all this without actually looking at Shed GPT. 00:26:34.540 --> 00:26:39.260 So we're also trying to see some of these things that we now know because we looked 00:26:39.260 --> 00:26:45.800 at the patterns, might these things help us to write better prompts for things like whether 00:26:45.800 --> 00:26:52.800 that is Shed GPT or any of these other tools and how would you need to do the prompt writing 00:26:52.820 --> 00:26:56.620 so that you actually get what you want to get. 00:26:56.860 --> 00:27:00.420 Some of this is really very strange because in a sense you know exactly what you want 00:27:00.420 --> 00:27:05.340 to get and then you spend all your time trying to explain this to the thing to see whether 00:27:05.340 --> 00:27:09.500 it can actually produce it, where you think if I just written this myself. 00:27:09.500 --> 00:27:15.740 But obviously we need to understand how these prompts can help us because then we can generalise 00:27:15.740 --> 00:27:17.660 from these insights. 00:27:17.660 --> 00:27:21.740 And we don't have enough time so that I could show you the longer narrative stuff, so I 00:27:21.820 --> 00:27:25.700 just show you a very small little example. 00:27:25.700 --> 00:27:32.700 And that is one from asking the thing to write a little poem or the beginning of a little 00:27:32.780 --> 00:27:32.980 poem. 00:27:32.980 --> 00:27:38.100 And that takes us back to the witches from the beginning to think about okay what do 00:27:38.100 --> 00:27:45.100 we get if we want a little poem about a witch and we want the poem to start by describing 00:27:45.720 --> 00:27:47.620 what the witch looks like. 00:27:47.860 --> 00:27:54.860 And also it's a poem for children and ideally written in rhyme and we don't want more than 00:27:55.420 --> 00:27:58.700 two stanzas for now because we just want to see. 00:27:58.700 --> 00:28:02.220 Now have a little read. 00:28:02.220 --> 00:28:05.460 James can you just read it for us? 00:28:05.460 --> 00:28:10.460 In a forest deep where the tall trees sway, lives a witch with a smile that sparkles like 00:28:10.460 --> 00:28:17.460 day, with hair like spun gold and eyes bright as doom, in lavender robes she's both friendly 00:28:17.620 --> 00:28:18.980 and true. 00:28:18.980 --> 00:28:25.980 Her broomsticks are danced with a sweep and a twirl, she gathers her dreams in a bright 00:28:25.980 --> 00:28:31.980 little swirl, with potions of wonder and tales yet untold, she whispers to stars as the night 00:28:31.980 --> 00:28:34.180 turns to gold. 00:28:34.180 --> 00:28:39.180 On a scale of one to five who thinks this is a five star poem? 00:28:39.180 --> 00:28:41.460 Hands up. 00:28:41.460 --> 00:28:43.580 You think it's a five star poem? 00:28:43.580 --> 00:28:46.180 Who thinks it's a one star poem? 00:28:47.180 --> 00:28:51.180 No one who thinks it's maybe three or something like this? 00:28:51.180 --> 00:28:55.180 Yeah, that's kind of a three star. 00:28:55.180 --> 00:29:00.180 So if I did a creative writing class I would probably say good start but maybe that's some 00:29:00.180 --> 00:29:02.180 things we've got to work on. 00:29:02.180 --> 00:29:07.180 And it also funny, I mean again I don't know how much UK TV you guys watch but it sounds 00:29:07.180 --> 00:29:11.180 to me very much like the Aldi Christmas ad. 00:29:11.180 --> 00:29:19.180 No, because they always do this like yeah then Kevin the Carrot and Blahdy Blah goes 00:29:19.180 --> 00:29:20.180 somewhere and does it. 00:29:20.180 --> 00:29:23.180 You know that is the kind of like easy something something. 00:29:23.180 --> 00:29:30.180 And what I was thinking when I tried to give the thing the prompt was really this one. 00:29:30.180 --> 00:29:31.180 Do you know that one? 00:29:31.180 --> 00:29:33.180 James do you want to read that as well? 00:29:34.180 --> 00:29:40.180 The witch had a cat and a hat that was black and long ginger hair and a braid down her back. 00:29:40.180 --> 00:29:46.180 This is a poem for children and that gets really exciting and interesting and some of 00:29:46.180 --> 00:29:50.180 the really exciting and interesting that happens there is actually the cat. 00:29:50.180 --> 00:29:52.180 So the witch had a cat. 00:29:52.180 --> 00:29:56.180 So it's not just about the hat that was black but it is about the cat. 00:29:56.180 --> 00:29:59.180 Everything else is just there to rhyme with cat really. 00:29:59.180 --> 00:30:04.180 But you see how that is already a bit of a different opening from the other ones where 00:30:04.180 --> 00:30:08.180 you get everything that we've always heard about witches put together in as many words 00:30:08.180 --> 00:30:09.180 as we need. 00:30:09.180 --> 00:30:15.180 And here Julia Donaldson who is absolutely brilliant for children's literature you see 00:30:15.180 --> 00:30:21.180 how she sets up the very beginning of the poem in the first line by putting in the cat. 00:30:21.180 --> 00:30:25.180 And that is one thing that so that is part of the stuff I'm trying to do at the moment 00:30:25.180 --> 00:30:29.180 is trying to think about narrative in terms of also the sequencing. 00:30:29.180 --> 00:30:34.180 It isn't just about putting patterns together because they have been set somehow. 00:30:34.180 --> 00:30:40.180 But you need this connection of you're actually wanting to arrive somewhere so it's good and 00:30:40.180 --> 00:30:44.180 well if stuff like, Gavin you mentioned this pseudo-write writes a little chapter for you. 00:30:44.180 --> 00:30:49.180 But if you don't know where you want to end with this it's neither here nor there. 00:30:49.180 --> 00:30:52.180 There's a lot of editing and doing stuff like this. 00:30:52.180 --> 00:30:54.180 Anyway this I just wanted to give you something. 00:30:54.180 --> 00:30:58.180 This is work in progress but you see what's currently happening so you might want to come 00:30:58.180 --> 00:30:59.180 back to this. 00:30:59.180 --> 00:31:03.180 And if you have ideas and if anyone is interested in getting into any of this just let me know. 00:31:03.180 --> 00:31:05.180 So some conclusions quickly. 00:31:06.180 --> 00:31:11.180 What I hope I have shown is that language is not the same as data. 00:31:11.180 --> 00:31:15.180 So rather than putting the bricks together having the house and telling the story after 00:31:15.180 --> 00:31:20.180 I would very much argue and say let's not forget the stories while we're actually looking 00:31:20.180 --> 00:31:21.180 at it. 00:31:21.180 --> 00:31:26.180 Also language is where society negotiates its value system. 00:31:26.180 --> 00:31:33.180 The fact that we have evaluation biases is something that is a snapshot at any one point 00:31:33.180 --> 00:31:38.180 in time but it doesn't have to stay like this and fiction is a place to help change this. 00:31:38.180 --> 00:31:45.180 Language really appears in the form of stories and stories and narratives they can be fictional 00:31:45.180 --> 00:31:46.180 or non-fictional. 00:31:46.180 --> 00:31:51.180 So my James Bond example and spies and all the rest of it and East End gang bosses. 00:31:51.180 --> 00:31:59.180 These boundaries are very fuzzy and therefore fiction also can change the world I strongly 00:31:59.180 --> 00:32:00.180 believe. 00:32:00.180 --> 00:32:07.180 For me as a corpus linguist I think we can provide theories and background stuff that 00:32:07.180 --> 00:32:12.180 we need to make sense in this age of AI that we're currently in. 00:32:12.180 --> 00:32:17.180 This was the last bit we need to think about the patterns of stuff we learn and what that 00:32:17.180 --> 00:32:23.180 can do in the world where chat GPT could take over a lot of the writing and the production. 00:32:23.180 --> 00:32:26.180 But here the question is why do we do this? 00:32:26.180 --> 00:32:28.180 Language always has a purpose. 00:32:29.180 --> 00:32:34.180 Do we write because we need a lot of text so that we have an awful lot of data to analyze 00:32:34.180 --> 00:32:38.180 or do we write because there's a purpose for that text? 00:32:38.180 --> 00:32:44.180 And that is something I want you to think about and there will be more on the things 00:32:44.180 --> 00:32:47.180 I've just mentioned somewhere here at some point. 00:32:47.180 --> 00:32:49.180 Okay and this is where I want to finish.