BEGIN:VCALENDAR METHOD:PUBLISH PRODID:www-dhss-phil-fau-eu//Events//EN VERSION:2.0 BEGIN:VEVENT SUMMARY:Katrin Rohrbacher: Modeling Fictional Worlds: A Quantitative A pproach to Setting UID:ccc1-4d44-be17-3444@www.dhss.phil.fau.eu DESCRIPTION:The Department of Digital Humanities and Social Studies wo uld like to invite you to the following talk in our DH Colloquium: Kat rin Rohrbacher: »Modeling Fictional Worlds: A Quantitative Approach t o Setting« Abstract This talk presents a quantitative approach to the study of fictional worlds through the lens of setting. Drawing on nar ratological theories of “\;worldbuilding”\;—particularly D avid Herman’s notion of “lived experience in an environment” and Gerhard Hoffmann’s tripartite model of setting—I argue that setti ng grounds narrative in embodied\, spatial experience. Using a manuall y annotated dataset of 2\,800 sentences\, I trained a BERT-based multi -class classifier and applied it to over 17 million sentences from 4\, 700 German-language fictional texts (1780–1940)\, alongside smaller corpora of canonical literature and nonfiction. My experiments examine setting across five dimensions: historical change\, genre differences \, canonicity\, narrative time\, and fiction vs. nonfiction. Results c hallenge common assumptions: the use of setting does not decline over time\, and static visual description plays a comparatively minor role in constructing fictional worlds. This study argues that the vividness of fictional worlds stems not from what is seen\, but from what is do ne in space—emphasizing fiction’s capacity to simulate the process ual\, reciprocal relation between body and environment. Further inform ation and other upcoming talks in the Colloquium can be found here. DTSTART:20250507T160000Z DTEND:20250507T180000Z LOCATION:Room 3.17 (3. OG)\, Werner-von-Siemens-Straße 61\, 91052 Erlangen DTSTAMP:20260413T041505Z END:VEVENT END:VCALENDAR