Welcome to The Senses of Stories

We are an international team exploring how literature engages the senses and sparks the imagination.

Stories are more than words on a page – they can make us see, hear, touch, taste, and feel. In this project, we investigate how sentences from literature create these sensory experiences, and we need your help.

By rating sentences, you’ll help us better understand how writers use language to create immersive experiences. Your contributions allow us to map features of literary style – how literature makes us see, hear, and feel – and study the embodied and imaginative power of storytelling.

Our data comes from individual sentences sampled from works of fiction and nonfiction, including World Literature, North American literature, fanfiction from different fandoms, and nonfiction like biographies. Sources include: C20, WORLDLIT, CONLIT, and FANFIC (excluding Mature content).

We hope you enjoy spending time with this diverse collection of texts, each with its own distinctive way of crafting a sentence. We also hope you’ll find it interesting to explore the ways they evoke sensory experiences. Taking a moment to notice how literature makes us imagine, see, hear, feel, or even taste can be surprisingly fun—and might even bring your attention to the richness of language in everyday reading. And who knows, you might stumble across a sentence you recognize along the way!

How It Works

We ask you to rate sentences from literature in three ways (choose your preferred workflow or mix freely):

Imageability – How imageable is the sentence? I.e., how strongly does the sentence evoke a sensory experience of any kind?

Concreteness – How concrete or abstract is the sentence? Does it refer to tangible things or experiences, or more to ideas and concepts?

Senses – How strongly does the sentence evoke each of six specific senses: sight, hearing, touch, smell, taste, and interoception (internal bodily sensations)?

Ratings are simple, intuitive, and rely on your first impression using a 7-point scale.

What Your Help Can Do

Your ratings will help researchers:

• Study sensory immersion in storytelling
• Explore how sensory language interacts with emotions and other narrative features
• Compare fictional and non-fictional stories across genres, periods, and cultures
• Support research into the limitations of AI models in how they understand the embodied senses of stories. Your annotations will help us study if AI models can understand stories in ways that align with your judgments. Note that our goal is to study human storytelling, not to build AI systems or robot storytellers. Our aim is academic: to further our understanding of this core aspect of storytelling. Check out our responsible AI pledge at our Citizen Readers organization page.