The Lives of Literary Characters

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. With your help, we are building AI models to better understand who characters are and what they do within diverse narrative worlds to address one very big question: why do human beings tell stories?

The proliferation of stories today is astounding. There is simply no way to account for the breadth of human creativity without relying on AI and automated forms of language understanding. But these systems are often trained in biased or unknown ways. This project is about enlisting the help of readers like you to build better, more transparent AI systems to surface the intricate patterns upon which human stories are based. All of the data and models we generate will be open to the public setting an important standard for transparent and inclusive AI. We're not about building chatbots or robot storytellers. Our aim is about understanding human storytelling.