Empirical Methods
The idea of asking questions about literature empirically, and getting to answer them, can be one of the most exciting things about cognitive approaches to the study of literature. It can also be one of the most daunting. There are as many methods as there are questions to ask, and the development of methods adequate to answering the questions we really want to about literature is still very much in progress. Many methods can be tried out in a modest way without too long a learning curve or substantial an investment of resources. This section provides an overview of some commonly employed methods for studying both texts and readers, and the kinds of question they can be used to tackle. Of course, many of the studies in the main Cognitive Humanities bibliography also employ empirical methods, so the Methods sections there can be mined for ideas too.
Compiled by Emily Troscianko
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Why do it?
The most basic argument for working empirically is that putting our theories and arguments to some kind of empirical test is an important way of corroborating, falsifying, and refining them. Here are some general introductions to reasons and methods for studying literature empirically:
Steen, G. J. (1991). The empirical study of literary reading: Methods of data collection. Poetics, 20, 339-575.
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An outline of the most common measures used in experiments with literary texts, including verbal and nonverbal, with varying degrees of control imposed by the experimenter, and administered before, during, or after reading. Each strikes at a different point the balance between analysability and manipulability on the one hand, and richness and validity on the other.
Martindale, C. (1996). Empirical questions deserve empirical answers. Philosophy and Literature, 20, 347-361.
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A forceful early advocacy of empirical literary studies, focused on the question of how much consistency or variation there is in trained and untrained readers’ interpretations and classifications of literature and other media. The sentence ‘Theories imply hypotheses, and hypotheses imply empirical or experimental testing’ nicely sums it up.
Bortolussi, M., and Dixon, P. (2003). Preliminaries. In M. Bortolussi and P. Dixon, Psychonarratology: Foundations for the empirical study of literary response, pp. 34-59. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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This chapter was designed in part to address the needs, interests, and concerns of literary scholars who may be intrigued by the empirical study of literary response but lack the confidence to pursue it on their own.’ The chapter includes an introduction to psychonarratology (the study of the psychological processing of narrative) and to the concepts of the ‘statistical reader’ and ‘measurement distributions’ of particular variables within a given population. It sets out some of the epistemological assumptions involved in empirical research on literature, as well as arguments for the importance of distinguishing clearly between text features and reader constructions, and the value of carrying out controlled ‘textual experiments’ in which texts are manipulated and changes in readers’ responses observed so as to eliminate potential confounds and move closer to causal explanations. (There are also some brief remarks on significance testing.) Subsequent chapters go into detail on the topics of narrator, events and plot, characters and characterisation, perception and focalisation, and represented speech and thought, in each case clarifying what it means to take a psychonarratological approach, and presenting existing empirical evidence on reader responses.
Lauer, G. (2009). Going empirical. Why we need cognitive literary studies. Journal of Literary Theory, 3(1), 145-154.
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A riposte to arguments against cognitive or neuroscientific approaches to the study of literature, emphasising the value of empiricism.
van Peer, W. (ed.) (2011). The future of scientific studies in literature. Special issue, Scientific Study of Literature, 1(1).
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The contributions to SSOL’s first issue include a range of theoretically and empirically orientated discussions, on topics including science and literariness, empirical narratives and ‘symptoms of science’, literature as entertainment, and cultural colonialism; the importance of interdisciplinarity in the teaching of literature; corpus and computational linguistics, the use of ‘textoids’ versus more naturalistic texts in experimental work; and individual differences and commonalities amongst readers and uses of language.
Hanauer, D. I., Kuiken, D., and Hakemulder, F. (2013). The scope of SSOL: A discussion of the boundaries of science and literature. Scientific Study of Literature, 3(2), 169-174.
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The editors of the then two-year-old journal try to clarify what they mean by science and by literature.
van Peer, W., & Chesnokova, A. (2019). What literature does to our emotions, and how do we know? Empirical studies will tell. Синопсис: текст, контекст, медіа, 25(1), 1-10.
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A discussion of the deteriorating relevance of traditional approaches to literary studies, arguing for empirical literary studies as a way to keep the study of literature relevant for the new generation of academics. The authors focus particularly on the key role of emotions in literature (referring to both emotions described in the text and those evoked in the reader), and outline a few reading experiments already conducted in this area.
Other relevant categories: Emotion
Wirag, A. (2020). The scope of empirical narratology. Frontiers of Narrative Studies, 6(1), 113-126.
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Offers an overview of the debate on whether empirical approaches are helpful or unhelpful to narratology; sets out the existing gains and future potential of qualitative, corpus-based, and experimental studies.
Malecki, W. P. (2023). Experimental methods for the environmental humanities: Measuring affects and effects. In Schneider-Mayerson, M., Weik, V. M. A., Malecki, W. P., & Hakemulder, F. (Eds), Empirical ecocriticism: Environmental narratives for social change (pp. 33-58). Minnesota, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
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Argues for the epistemological value of experimental methods, particularly randomized controlled studies, for the environmental humanities in investigating the causal effects of narratives on attitudes and actions relevant to climate change, nonhuman animals, etc.
Rating scales and questionnaires
Some variant on rating-scale research is the most common way of working empirically with literary response. You can make up your own questions, or use sets of questions designed and validated by other people, or a mixture. The validated scales below were designed specifically with aesthetic responses in mind, but you can find online validated scales to measure countless trait and state variables that may differentiate your participants or their responses.
Validated literature/narrative-specific questionnaires
Miall, D.S., and Kuiken, D. (1995). Aspects of literary response: A new questionnaire. Research in the Teaching of English, 17, 37-58.
The Literary Response Questionnaire provides scales to measure insight, empathy, imagery vividness, leisure escape, concern with author, story-driven reading, and rejection of literary values in readers’ orientations towards literary texts. This paper describes the LRQ’s development and relates its subscales to readers’ personality traits and learning skills.
Green, M. C., and Brock, T. C. (2000). The role of transportation in the persuasiveness of public narratives. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 79(5), 701-721.
Develops and validates a transportation scale to measure absorption into a story (conceived of as involving mental imagery, emotion, and attentional focus). Experiments using the scale are reported that show effects of transportation level on story-consistent beliefs, and on evaluations of protagonists and other textual features, while finding no effect on transportation from labelling stories as fact or as fiction.
(For an application of this scale in two experiments investigating interactions between readers’ pre-reading emotional states and the emotional tone of the narrative, see also Green, M. C., Chatham, C., and Sestir, M. A. (2012). Emotion and transportation into fact and fiction. Scientific Study of Literature, 2(1), 37-59. https://www.jbe-platform.com/content/journals/10.1075/ssol.2.1.03gre See also Thompson and Haddock 2012 (in the Cognitive Humanities bibliography section Personality and Individual Difference) for use of the transportation scale in the context of a study on individuals’ drinking habits, attitudes, and intentions.)
Miall, D. S., and Kuiken, D. (2001). Shifting perspectives: Readers’ feelings and literary response. In W. van Peer and S. Chatman (Eds), New perspectives on narrative perspective, (pp. 289-302). Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.
Investigates the relationships between aesthetic feeling, foregrounding, and reader perspective using a combination of measures: pre-validated questionnaires (the Literary Response Questionnaire and the Multidimensional Personality Questionnaire), reading times, and think-aloud protocols (relating to thoughts and feelings while reading), plus pre-existing and tailored discourse measures (for propositional features, discontinuities, and experiential perspective). The think-aloud protocols were analysed only informally, to add depth to the results gathered using the other measures. The findings contribute to a model of the interpretive process as a phasic cycle.
Busselle, R., and Bilandzic, H. (2009). Measuring narrative engagement. Media Psychology, 12, 321-347.
Describes the development and validation of a scale to measure narrative engagement based on a mental-models approach to narrative processing across media. The scale distinguishes between narrative understanding, attentional focus, emotional engagement, and narrative presence, and is validated using data from viewers of movies and TV programmes in different viewing situations and from the USA and Germany.
Kuijpers, M. M., Hakemulder, F., Tan, E. S., and Doicaru, M. M. (2014). Exploring absorbing reading experiences: Developing and validating a self-report scale to measure story world absorption. Scientific Study of Literature, 4(1), 89-122.
The scale includes the dimensions of attention, transportation, emotional engagement, and mental imagery (these subscales can also be used independently), and predicts two distinct evaluative responses: enjoyment and impact. The authors argue that the subscale of narrative presence in Busselle and Bilanszic’s narrative engagement scale confounds two dimensions (transportation and attention), and that Green and Brock’s transportation scale also lacks precision relative to theirs. For more info, see https://www.moniekkuijpers.com/swas
Moore, M., & Gordon, P. C. (2015). Reading ability and print exposure: Item response theory analysis of the author recognition test. Behavior Research Methods, 47(4), 1095-1109.
Outlines the use of the Author Recognition Test (a list of real and distractor author names) as a strong predictor of reading skill, with a potential two factor structure differentiating between literary and popular authors. This scale is often used to control for reading ability as a variable that may otherwise be a serious confound in reading experiments.
Thissen, B. A., Menninghaus, W., & Schlotz, W. (2018). Measuring optimal reading experiences: The reading flow short scale. Frontiers in Psychology, 9, 2542.
The latest version of a rating scale to assess immersion when reading a text. A study using the scale found high positive correlations with presence, identification, suspense, and cognitive mastery, and a moderately positive correlation with enjoyment.
Other relevant categories: Interpersonal emotion
Bilandzic, H., Sukalla, F., Schnell, C., Hastall, M. R., & Busselle, R. W. (2019). The narrative engageability scale: A multidimensional trait measure for the propensity to become engaged in a story. International Journal of Communication, 13, 32.
A multidimensional scale to assess one’s propensity to be transported including questions about presence, emotional engageability, curiosity and suspense seeking, and acceptance of unrealism. Positive correlations were found with the transportation scale, but it has so far only been tested with cinema and TV shows.
Other relevant categories: Immersion/transportation
Kuijpers, M. M. (2021). Exploring the dimensional relationships of story world absorption: A commentary on the role of attention during absorbed reading. Scientific Study of Literature, 11(2), 266-282.
Uses the Story World Absorption Scale (Kuijpers et al., 2014; see above) to investigate the interrelations of the four dimensions of Attention, Emotional Engagement, Mental Imagery, and Transportation, finding a significant role for attention. Includes a broader discussion of the uses of multi-dimensional instruments in empirical literary studies.
Other relevant categories: Immersion/transportation
Pianzola, F. (2021). Presence, flow, and narrative absorption questionnaires: a scoping review. Open Research Europe, 1, 11.
A review of existing scales measuring “presence,” “flow,” and “narrative absorption” in order to identify commonalities to guide future scale refinement and other research, finding that attention and a sense of time recur most frequently.
Other relevant categories: Attention, Immersion/Transportation
Huang, K. Y., & Fung, H. H. (2024). Measuring identification with narrative characters: the development and validation of a new scale. Current Psychology, 43(30), 24835-24849.
Describes the design and validation of a new 12-item scale for measuring identification, defined as a sense of merging between self and character.
Other relevant categories: Identification
Frazer, R., Grizzard, M., & Moyer-Gusé, E. (2025). Conceptualizing and Measuring Character Depth. Media Psychology, 1-28.
Discusses the importance of character depth as an overlooked aspect of characterization in narrative engagement and develops and validates a scale to measure it, concluding with suggestions for applications to research on phenomena including narrative complexity and narrative persuasion.
Other relevant categories: Qualitative methods
Piţur, S., Tufar, I., & Miu, A. C. (2025). Auditory imagery and poetry-elicited emotions: a study on the hard of hearing. Frontiers in psychology, 16, 1509793.
Uses a range of validated scales to investigate the relation between auditory imagery and emotional responses to poetry in individuals who are hard of hearing, finding that lower scores on all auditory imagery measures did not correlate with diminished emotional intensity.
Other relevant categories: Mental imagery and imagination, Sensory perception
Ad hoc scales
Hilscher, M. C., and Cupchik, G. C. (2005). Reading, hearing, and seeing poetry performed. Empirical Studies of the Arts, 23(1), 47-64.
Investigates different ways of experiencing poetry by means of two questionnaires constructed for the purposes of this study: the General Poetry Questionnaire (about general experiences and impressions of poetry, administered beforehand) and the Poetry Reception Questionnaire (about the cognitive-emotional nuances of poetry reception, administered after reading), plus one open-ended question about the poem’s meaning (answered before the PRQ). The free-response paragraphs were analysed using a qualitative method of category construction. The study found that people prefer reading poetry rather than hearing it read or seeing it performed, since this lets them explore the text more independently and creatively.
Carney, J., Wlodarski, R., and Dunbar, R. (2014). Inference or enaction? The impact of genre on the narrative processing of other minds. PLoS One, 9(12), e114172.
Administers rating scales tapping engagement with the text and evaluations of literary quality to investigate whether narratives affect how we interact with other minds. A contrast was found in assessment of the literary quality of relationship versus espionage stories (as examples of evolutionarily familiar versus unfamiliar scenarios), depending on how many levels of intentionality they incorporated.
Schneider-Mayerson, M., Gustafson, A., Leiserowitz, A., Goldberg, M. H., Rosenthal, S. A., & Ballew, M. (2023). Environmental literature as persuasion: An experimental test of the effects of reading climate fiction. Environmental Communication, 17(1), 35-50.
Describes a climate fiction-reading experiment conducted to assess its impact on the participants’ beliefs about global warming. Rating scales were used to assess participants’ concerns about global warming immediately after reading the text, after one month, and also to measure their transportation and identification with the text.
Online surveys
Koopman, E. (2011). Predictors of insight and catharsis among readers who use literature as a coping strategy. Scientific Study of Literature, 1(2), 241-259.
Uses an online survey to ask respondents to report on music and literature that helped them get through a difficult time in their lives. They were asked questions (on 7-point scales) about their loss experience, coping style, and engagement with the music or literature. Aesthetic feelings (attention to and appreciation of stylistic features) were found to correlate with absorption and with experiencing more thoughts during reading, but not with catharsis or insight, which instead correlated with narrative feelings (identifying with the character and feeling absorbed in the narrative world). However, a subgroup also found therapeutic value in the comfort of aesthetic beauty.
Troscianko, E. T. (2018). Literary reading and eating disorders: survey evidence of therapeutic help and harm. Journal of Eating Disorders, 6(1), 1-17.
A large online survey investigating respondents’ perceptions of the connections between their reading habits and their mental health, with a focus on eating disorders. The results show a strong correlation between reading eating disorder-themed texts and self-assessed significant detrimental effects on all studied dimensions (mood, self-esteem, feelings about one’s body, and diet and exercise habits), while self-reported responses to respondents’ preferred type of other fiction were neutral or positive.
Koolen, C., van Dalen-Oskam, K., van Cranenburgh, A., & Nagelhout, E. (2020). Literary quality in the eye of the Dutch reader: The National Reader Survey. Poetics, 79, 101439.
Describes the development and some applications of the National Reader Survey, designed to assess the extent to which modern Dutch-language texts have an inherent “literary value”.
Qualitative and mixed methods
There are a variety of responses to the restrictions imposed by rating-scale paradigms. Here are just a few, generating more complex verbal data and then seeking to interpret it.
Van Peer, W. (1990). The measurement of metre: Its cognitive and affective functions. Poetics, 19, 259-275.
Participants’ responses to a metrical and a non-metrical version of a poem are measured using 16 semantic differential scales (pairs of adjectives chosen to tap aesthetic reactions) plus a multiple-choice recall task and some comprehension questions. Metrical structure was found to enhance aesthetic pleasure and the ability to recognise segments of the text afterwards.
(For a review of the semantic differential method, see also Heise, D. R. (1970). The semantic differential and attitude research, in G. F. Summers (Ed), Attitude measurement (pp. 235-253). Chicago: Rand McNally. http://www.indiana.edu/~socpsy/papers/AttMeasure/attitude..htm.)
Claassen, E. (2012). Author inferences in thinking aloud. In E. Claassen, Author representations in literary reading (pp. 61-101). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
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Asks whether and how readers generate inferences about authors during the reading of narrative text, and if so, whether they can be revealed through think-aloud protocols. Includes methodological reflections on think-aloud as opposed to other methods, and what they can and cannot be used to demonstrate. In particular, the exploratory study described investigates whether inferences about authors contribute to a mental representation of the communication context, and whether a narrator’s visibility and/or particular reading strategies affect these inferences. Participants were asked to share their thoughts when they reached a black mark in the text, and also to give a summary of the text afterwards (with or without an instruction to reflect on authorial intention), as well as completing a short questionnaire on text evaluation and reading behaviour. The protocol coding procedure and statistical (chi-squared) analysis are also described in detail, and the findings include reflections on the limitations of the think-aloud method when it comes to automatically generated inferences.
Gibbs, R. W., and Blackwell, N. (2012). Climbing the ladder to literary Heaven: A case study of allegorical interpretation. Scientific Study of Literature, 2(2), 199-217.
The authors asked participants to read a passage of extended metaphor from a novel and immediately write out their responses to a series of prompts/questions like ‘Please describe what the infinitely tall ladder refers to or represents’, ‘What would happen if the author “loosened his grip” while on the ladder and “fell to one side”?’, and ‘Describe the bodily sensations you felt while reading the story’. Participants’ responses manifested common features of the LIFE IS A JOURNEY metaphorical field and also elaborated on it with personal readings.
Dixon, P., Bortolussi, M., and Mullins, B. (2015). Judging a book by its cover. Scientific Study of Literature, 5(1), 23-48.
In this study, self-identified science-fiction fans and mystery fans sorted 80 randomly selected book genres from both genres into groups of their own devising; their sorts were used to identify similarity among books, and that similarity structure was used to measure similarity among participants, with cluster analysis used to find groups who sorted similarly. Group membership was related to reported knowledge about the genres, indicating the effectiveness of covers as an implicit signalling system between publishers and experienced readers of a given genre.
Otis, L. (2015). The value of qualitative research for cognitive literary studies. In The Oxford handbook of cognitive literary studies (pp. 505-524). Oxford University Press.
Analyses the introspections, generated in one-to-one interviews, of 34 prominent scientists, writers, designers, and scholars, including Temple Grandin and Salman Rushdie, about the visual mental imagery they form while thinking, reading, and writing. The results are connected to debates on visual versus verbal cognitive styles, and suggest a high degree of individual variation in object versus spatial visualisation.
Fernandez-Quintanilla, C. (2020). Textual and reader factors in narrative empathy: An empirical reader response study using focus groups. Language and Literature, 29(2), 124-146.
An investigation of the role played by readers‘ individual moral judgements and emotional responses versus text language in generating empathy, positioning itself as “a qualitative approach to collecting and analysing readers’ responses that is half way between naturalistic and experimental orientations”. Participants discussed their responses to two short stories about torture (describing both the victim and the torturer) in focus groups.
Other relevant categories: Emotion
Pianzola, F., Rebora, S., & Lauer, G. (2020). Wattpad as a resource for literary studies. Quantitative and qualitative examples of the importance of digital social reading and readers’ comments in the margins. PloS One, 15(1), e0226708.
Scrapes millions of user-generated texts and inline comments from the social reading platform Wattpad and uses close qualitative reading to develop categories followed by large-scale computational analyses (sentiment analysis, topic models, network measures, frequency counts) across the corpus. As an example of scalable mixed methods, the study shows how naturally occurring, free-form reader responses can be treated as qualitative data and converted into reproducible, large-N quantitative evidence about patterns of emotional engagement, aesthetic values, and social interaction via reading.
Other relevant categories: Emotion; Statistics; Content analysis
Steenberg, M., Christiansen, C., Dalsgård, A. L., Stagis, A. M., Ahlgren, L. M., Nielsen, T. L., & Ladegaard, N. (2021). Facilitating reading engagement in shared reading. Poetics Today, 42(2), 229-251.
Uses conversation analysis to explore the role of the facilitator in encouraging engagement in shared reading contexts.
Kamp, A., Bood, Z., Scherer-Rath, M., Weeseman, Y., Christophe, N., Dörr, H., … & van Laarhoven, H. W. (2022). Narrative recognition and identification: a qualitative pilot study into reading literary texts with advanced cancer patients. Journal of Cancer Survivorship, 16(3), 531-541.
Uses template analysis, a form of thematic analysis, to analyse the responses of a small group of patients with advanced cancer to narrative texts, read by participants with the help of a reading guide that also scaffolds the analysis. The study found that guided reading supports expression of and reflection on experience and meaning.
Other relevant categories: Mental health, disability, loss
Parks, P. (2023). Story circles: A new method of narrative research. American Journal of Qualitative Research, 7(1), 58-72.
Presents a new Story Circle method, a form of group-based narrative data collection, to generate over two hundred anecdotes about experiences leading to teacher identity development over six one-hour sessions; stories were then parsed and coded using Labov’s (1972) Evaluation Model of Narrative. This study doesn’t itself investigate literary experiences, but the method could be adapted to study how people co-construct stories about or in response to literary texts.
van de Ven, I. (2023). “Gonna get you, baby!” A qualitative-empirical study of attentional modulation in reading a short story. Language and Literature, 32(4), 458-478.
A qualitative study with interviews and group discussions assessing attention, mind-wandering, and close reading patterns with a short story.
Andersen, T. R., & Hakemulder, F. (2024). “The poem has stayed with me”: Continued processing and impact from Shared Reading experiences of people living with cancer. Poetics, 102, 101847.
Gathers qualitative and quantitative data from four readers over 32 shared reading sessions in which the lead researcher actively participated, and analyses them using grounded theory and a temporality framework. The data types include: background questionnaire, audio recordings, written responses, post-reading scales, audio diaries, focus group interviews, semi-structured individual interviews, and researcher discussions of the literary texts being read. The researchers found that participants reports deriving hope, energy, and resilience from their reading experiences during contexts of low energy, motivation, and meaning.
Other relevant categories: Mental health, disability, loss
Kuijpers, M. M., Lusetti, M., Lendvai, P., & Rebora, S. (2024). Validation of the Story World Absorption Scale through annotation of online book reviews. Journal of Cultural Analytics, 9(1).
The methodology involves developing an annotation/tag set based on the Story World Absorption Scale (SWAS), manually annotating a large sample of online book reviews mentioning absorption, and using the annotations to evaluate and validate SWAS items and to run corpus-level statistical analyses (frequencies, correlations with ratings/genres, inter-coder reliability). The study demonstrates a pipeline from qualitative interpretive categories (naturally generated text data) to annotated dataset (coding) to quantitative inference (including statistical reliability metrics). It also generates openly available corpus/guidelines (published elsewhere) that may be useful for replication and teaching purposes.
Other relevant categories: Absorption; Immersion/Transportation; Statistics
Probes during reading
The trouble with think-aloud methods is how severely they disrupt the ‘normal reading experience’. Other kinds of real-time probe may be much less intrusive. They seem to be being developed primarily for studying film (though see Other physiological measures below), but would transfer well to literary studies.
Troscianko, T., Meese, T., and Hinde, S. (2012). Perception while watching movies: Effects of physical screen size and scene type. i-Perception, 3, 414-425.
Develops a simple measure to track ongoing ‘presence’ (involvement) in real time: participants were prompted to report their level of presence using a line-bisection task at intervals in a 45-minute section of film (‘You should make a mark on the line to indicate how “present” you feel in the movie just before the light came on. If you feel completely “in the story,” then your mark should be at the far right of the line. If you feel that you are viewing the movie, then place your mark on the far left of the line.’). Measures of pupil dilation and reaction times (a timed button pressed signalled by a beep) were also obtained. The first study found correlations between presence and physical screen size, and between presence and scenes focused on faces rather than landscapes. The second study found a correlation between presence and pupil dilation (even when controlling for variations in screen luminance), though not between presence and reaction times (but overall presence levels were lower in this experiment, presumably due to increased intrusion from the three measures), suggesting that pupil dilation may be a more sensitive measure than reaction times.
Bezdek, M., and Gerrig, R. (2016). When narrative transportation narrows attention: Changes in attentional focus during suspenseful viewing. Media Psychology, 20(1), 60-89.
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In order to explore the dynamic role of attention in narrative transportation, a reaction time-based method of real-time probing is developed to indicate the extent to which the primary task (watching a movie excerpt) commands viewers’ cognitive resources. Participants were asked to respond to a probe tone by pressing a button on a computer keyboard. Of particular interest were ‘hot spot’ moments where potential negative outcomes are emphasised. Reaction times were found to be longer, and more probes were missed, during hot spots than during cold spots. The researchers also administered a visual recognition memory task, asking participants to identify still images from the film clips, but confounding factors were identified for this measure, and they concluded that measuring narrative recall may work better.
Isik, A. I., & Vessel, E. A. (2019). Continuous ratings of movie watching reveal idiosyncratic dynamics of aesthetic enjoyment. PLoS One, 14(10), e0223896.
Participants give moment-by-moment ratings (dial/slider) of enjoyment and intensity of aesthetic experience while watching short video clips; these continuous traces are compared against overall post-hoc judgements, finding that the task of making continuous ratings did not influence overall ratings or agreement across participants. The authors concluded that temporally extended stimuli produce aesthetic experiences that are not the same from person to person, and that continuous behavioural ratings provide a reliable window into the temporal dynamics of such aesthetic experiences while not materially altering the experiences themselves.
Schurer, T., Opitz, B., & Schubert, T. (2020). Working memory capacity but not prior knowledge impact on readers’ attention and text comprehension. Frontiers in Education, 5(26).
While reading either a coherent or incoherent version of the same unfamiliar hypertext about the copyright law, participants reported self-caught mind wandering with task-embedded thought probes. After reading the hypertext, participants were tested on their text comprehension, confirming that mind wandering occurs more frequently when participants read difficult rather than easy texts regardless of their specialism but modulated by working memory capacity. The thought probes involved asking participants what they were thinking of just before the thought probe appeared in a pop-up window in the bottom of the screen accompanied by a beep, with 4 response options: (1) thinking of the text; (2) thinking how well I’m understanding the text; (3) thinking about the current state of being; (4) having a memory in the past or something in the future.
Other relevant categories: Attention, Statistics
Levordashka, A., Stanton Fraser, D., & Gilchrist, I. D. (2023). Measuring real-time cognitive engagement in remote audiences. Scientific Reports, 13(1), 10516.
The authors used motion-tracking of the head via a web-camera to measure real-time cognitive engagement in 132 individuals while they watched 30 min of streamed theatre content at home. Head movement was negatively associated with engagement across a constellation of measures. Individuals who moved less reported feeling more engaged and immersed, evaluated the performance as more engaging, and were more likely to express interest in watching further. The results demonstrate the value of in-home remote motion tracking as a low-cost, scalable metric of cognitive engagement, which can be used to collect audience behaviour data in a natural setting.
Other relevant categories: Immersion/Transportation
Winkler, J. R., Appel, M., Schmidt, M. L. C., & Richter, T. (2023). The experience of emotional shifts in narrative persuasion. Media Psychology, 26(2), 141-171.
While reading a story, participants marked any section of the text in which they experienced an emotional response with an “E” on the margin. After reading, participants were asked to specify the emotions they experienced (using the six basic emotions anger, happiness, sadness, fear, surprise, and disgust) and rate the intensity of each (from 1 to 7). Affect, attitude, and transportation measures were also taken, and transportation was manipulated via positive and negative reviews prior to story exposure. Consistent with theory, transportation was positively associated with the number and intensity of emotional shifts, and linked to affective-level attitudes in particular.
Eye tracking
Eye tracking is a way of gathering lots of detailed information about cognitive processing indirectly (i.e. without needing to ask people to report on anything), and as the technology advances, this method also becomes ever less intrusive.
Rayner, K. (1998). Movements in reading and information processing: 20 years of research. Psychological Bulletin, 124, 372-422.
A review of the specifics of how eye movements reflect moment-to-moment cognitive processes involved in reading. The paper includes an outline of the basic characteristics of eye movements and fixations, some methods for measuring them, and features of eye-movement patterns like regression, refixations, and word skipping, as well as discussion of variation in reading practices during typical development and in people with reading difficulties.
Kaakinen, J. K., and Hyönä, J. (2008). Perspective-driven text comprehension. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 22, 319-334.
The texts used here are in no sense literary, but the study illustrates a combination of eye tracking with written free recall of a text, following instructions to adopt a particular perspective when reading a text version where the (ir)relevance of the text to the perspective is either transparent or opaque. The authors conclude that perspective-related prior knowledge modulates the perspective effects observed in text processing, and that signalling of (ir)relevance helps readers encode relevant information to memory.
Koops van ‘t Jagt, R., Hoeks, J., Dorleijn, G., and Hendriks, P. (2014). Look before you leap: How enjambment affects the processing of poetry. Scientific Study of Literature, 4(1), 3-24.
Uses eye tracking to investigate the differences in reading poetry with or without enjambments (of both the prospective and the retrospective kind), using both authentic and specially constructed examples of enjambment. The study found significant differences between conditions, favouring a dynamic model of integrative language processing.
Hoven, E., Hartung, F. C., Burke, M., & Willems, R. M. (2016). Individual differences in sensitivity to style during literary reading: Insights from eye-tracking.
Reports on an eye-tracking study finding significant variation in readers’ sensitivity to foregrounding features: some readers don’t slow down at all when reading foregrounded passages, while others slowed down a lot during foregrounded passages as well as for high-perplexity words (as one might expect as a result of higher processing demands).
Child, S., Oakhill, J., & Garnham, A. (2020). Tracking your emotions: An eye-tracking study on reader’s engagement with perspective during text comprehension. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 73(6), 929-940.
An investigation of reader comprehension when reading a passage which uses “you”, versus a passage using “he/she” with eye-tracking. The results suggested that participants had longer fixation times at the beginning of the passage when “he/she” was used (a surprising finding given how rarely fiction uses “you” for the protagonist), but the fixation time shortened as they kept reading the passage, suggesting they got used to the pronoun.
Magyari, L., Mangen, A., Kuzmičová, A., Jacobs, A. M., & Lüdtke, J. (2020). Eye movements and mental imagery during reading of literary texts with different narrative styles. Journal of Eye Movement Research, 13(3), 10-16910.
This study assesses differences in mental imagery when reading an enactive passage and a descriptive passage with eye-tracking and post-reading questions. The results suggest that enactive texts may elicit more mental imagery than descriptive passages, but no differences were found in reader immersion.
Beck, J., & Konieczny, L. (2021). Rhythmic subvocalization: An eye-tracking study on silent poetry reading. Journal of Eye Movement Research, 13(3), 10-16910.
In this study, eye-tracking during silent reading of metrically regular, rhymed poems (manipulating layout to “prose” or “poem” format and introducing metrical or rhyme anomalies) to show how readers’ fixation and regression patterns, reading times, and rereading behaviour reflect metric and rhyme structure. Effects of syllable number also indicated a high degree of subvocalization, and the overall pattern of results suggests that eye-movements reflect, and are closely aligned with, the rhythmic subvocalization of MRRL.
Eekhof, L. S., Van Krieken, K., Sanders, J., & Willems, R. M. (2021). Reading minds, reading stories: Social-cognitive abilities affect the linguistic processing of narrative viewpoint. Frontiers in Psychology, 12, 698986.
An assessment of how interpersonal differences in perspective-taking ability may affect reading perceptual markers (e.g. “heard”, “felt”) and cognitive markers (“thought”, “believed”). Eye-tracking was used while participants read Dutch nonfiction articles from a weekly news magazine. The results suggested that those with higher scores on the perspective-taking scale processed the perceptual and cognitive markers more quickly, but that all participants also slowed down their reading at certain points when there was emotion-evoking text content.
Arfé, B., Delatorre, P., & Mason, L. (2023). Effects of negative emotional valence on readers’ text processing and memory for text: An eye-tracking study. Reading and Writing, 36(7), 1743-1768.
The experiment assessed the roles of negative emotion-evoking writing and neutral writing on fixation times and recall using eye-tracking and questionnaires. The results suggested that participants spend longer reading the negative emotion-evoking passage and had better recall for it than the manipulated neutral text.
Mak, M., Faber, M., & Willems, R. M. (2023). Different kinds of simulation during literary reading: Insights from a combined fMRI and eye-tracking study. Cortex, 162, 115-135.
The authors used simultaneous eye-tracking and fMRI while participants read short literary narratives pre-annotated for passages likely to elicit motor simulation, perceptual simulation, or mentalizing, in a design combining gaze metrics with neural activation and individual-difference questionnaires. Individual variation in activated areas was related to measures of story appreciation as well as personal characteristics (transportability, perspective-taking). Taken together, these findings suggest that mental simulation is supported both by domain-specific processes grounded in previous experiences, and by neural mechanisms that underlie higher-order language processing (e.g. situation model building, event indexing, integration).
Other relevant categories: Brain imaging
Brain imaging
Certainly the trendiest way of doing cognitive research right now, if not the most informative, brain imaging has a solid history in the study of metaphor processing, and is now making its way into the study of specifically literary reading.
Mashal, N., Faust, M., Hendler, T., and Jung-Beeman, M. (2007). An fMRI investigation of the neural correlates underlying the processing of novel metaphoric expressions. Brain and Language, 100, 115-126.
One of many fMRI studies on the processing of literal versus metaphorical language (often also using irony as an additional control) that demonstrate the involvement of the right hemisphere (usually associated with visuospatial rather than linguistic processing) in metaphor processing, this one suggests that interpretive salience—the extent to which a metaphor is novel (nonsalient) versus conventional (salient)—is actually the primary factor predicting RH involvement.
Yarkoni, T., Speer, N. K., Balota, D. A., McAvoy, M. P., and Zacks, J. M. (2008). Pictures of a thousand words: Investigating the neural mechanisms of reading with extremely rapid eventrelated fMRI. NeuroImage, 42, 973-987.
Describes a new ‘event-related reading’ method for fMRI, tested in an experiment in which reading of coherent narrative revealed widespread effects of orthographic, phonological, contextual, and semantic variables on brain activation. Results appear to replicate across previous single-word fMRI experiments, and to predict individual differences in reading comprehension.
Miall, D. S. (2011). Emotions and the structuring of narrative experience. Poetics Today, 32, 323-248.
Argues that findings from studies of evoked-response potentials (ERPs—an electrical potential recorded using EEG or EMG) indicate an early (within the first half second of response) and central role for emotion in the cognitive processing of language, including in areas such as inferencing, autobiographical memory and self-reference, anticipation, narrativising, and empathy.
Zeman, A., Milton, F., Smith, A., & Rylance, R. (2013). By heart an fMRI study of brain activation by poetry and prose. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 20(9-10), 132-158.
Access it here: (paywall) or (full-text repository)
Wehbe, L., Murphy, B., Talukdar, P., Fyshe, A., Ramdas, A., & Mitchell, T. (2014). Simultaneously uncovering the patterns of brain regions involved in different story reading subprocesses. PloS One, 9(11), e112575.
Working with data generated by participants reading chapter 9 of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, the authors present an integrated computational model of reading that incorporates numerous perceptual and cognitive subprocesses, in a method that simultaneously tracks diverse reading subprocesses during complex story processing and predicts the detailed neural representation of diverse story features, ranging from visual word properties to the mention of different story characters and different actions they perform. The results are compared with existing results from single process studies, and the methods could be used in future to study individual differences in reading.
Hsu, C. T., Jacobs, A. M., Citron, F. M., & Conrad, M. (2015). The emotion potential of words and passages in reading Harry Potter: An fMRI study. Brain and Language, 142, 96-114.
The authors presented 24 participants under fMRI with text passages from the Harry Potter book series to investigate the potential of words to induce emotional engagement when reading, and found that participants’ individual emotion ratings of entire passages correlated with normative affective values of their constituting words, and that affective lexical ratings correlated with activity in regions associated with emotion, situation model building, multi-modal semantic integration, and Theory of Mind.
Nijhof, A. D., & Willems, R. M. (2015). Simulating fiction: Individual differences in literature comprehension revealed with fMRI. PLoS One, 10(2), e0116492.
An fMRI study using excerpts from Dutch literary fiction, suggesting that ‘some people are mostly drawn into a story by mentalizing about the thoughts and beliefs of others, whereas others engage in literature by simulating more concrete events such as actions’.
Phillips, N. M. (2015). Literary neuroscience and history of mind: An interdisciplinary fMRI study of attention and Jane Austen. In L. Zunshine (Ed.), The Oxford handbook of cognitive literary studies (pp. 55-81). New York: Oxford University Press.
Describes an experiment in which participants (18 PhD students expert in literary analysis) were asked to switch between close reading and reading for pleasure as they read Chapter 2 of Mansfield Park while lying in the fMRI scanner, finding overlapping but distinctive activation patterns between the two. The study also used fMRI-compatible eye tracking, plus heart rate and breathing measures, but it’s not clear whether those data were ever published.
Hartung, F., Hagoort, P., & Willems, R. M. (2017). Readers select a comprehension mode independent of pronoun: Evidence from fMRI during narrative comprehension. Brain and Language, 170, 29-38.
“To investigate how linguistically encoded perspective relates to cognitive perspective taking, this study involved participants listening to short literary stories using either 1st- or 3rd-person pronouns to refer to the protagonist, while undergoing fMRI. When comparing action events with 1st- versus 3rd-person pronouns, we found no evidence for a neural dissociation depending on pronoun. A split sample approach based on the self-reported experience of perspective taking revealed 3 comprehension preferences: a strong 1st-person preference, a strong 3rd-person preference, or engagement in 1st- and 3rd-person perspective taking simultaneously. Comparing brain activations of the groups revealed different neural networks. Our results suggest that comprehension is perspective-dependent, but that it depends not on the perspective suggested by the text, but on the reader’s (situational) preference.”
Hartung, F., & Willems, R. M. (2020). Amount of fiction reading correlates with higher connectivity between cortical areas for language and mentalizing. bioRxiv, 2020-06.
In this study, participants answered a questionnaire about how frequently they read fiction and then listened to two literary narratives during an fMRI. The results found a positive correlation between how much participants read and the areas of the brain associated with language and mentalizing. There was however no relationship found between empathy (assessed using an empathy quotient questionnaire) and fiction-reading habits.s.
Hu, B., Cui, Y. L., Yu, Y., Li, Y. T., Yan, L. F., Sun, J. T., … & Cui, G. B. (2022). Combining dynamic network analysis and cerebral carryover effect to evaluate the impacts of reading social media posts and science fiction in the natural state on the human brain. Frontiers in Neuroscience, 16, 827396.
The researchers were investigating differences in reading science fiction versus reading social media posts using a dynamic function network activity (dFNC) analysis and fMRIs. A baseline fMRI was conducted on all participants, and they were then asked to read either a science fiction text or social media posts on their phones. A second round of fMRI was then conducted after the reading. The results suggested that those reading science fiction had increased nodal efficiencies afterwards, which indicated encouragement for deep thinking. The scans of those who read the social media posts indicated increased mind-wandering and and a decrease in reasoning and working memory abilities.
Davydova, T., Marin, L. M., Vives, M. L., Pérez, M. B., Rubio, E. C., Visser, M., & Costumero, V. (2025). Reading fiction in a foreign language reduces the neural synchronization between semantic and emotional areas. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 1-12.
This study used fMRI with participants fluent in both English and Spanish while they silently read happy, fearful, and neutral text passages in their first and second languages. The results indicated a stronger response in the brain’s limbic system when participants read in their first language.
Open-access databases
Bhattasali, S., Brennan, J., Luh, W. M., Franzluebbers, B., & Hale, J. (2020). The Alice Dataset: fMRI Dataset to Study Natural Language Comprehension in the Brain. Open-Neuro.[Dataset]
Participants listened passively to an audiobook version of the first chapter of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, before completing a twelve-question multiple-choice questionnaire concerning events and situations described in the story.
Li, J., Bhattasali, S., Zhang, S., Franzluebbers, B., Luh, W. M., Spreng, R. N., … & Hale, J. (2022). Le Petit Prince multilingual naturalistic fMRI corpus. Scientific Data, 9(1), 530.
49 English speakers, 35 Chinese speakers and 28 French speakers listened to an audiobook version of The Little Prince in their native language while multi-echo functional magnetic resonance imaging was acquired. The authors also provide time-aligned speech annotation and word-by-word predictors obtained using natural language processing tools. This annotated, multilingual fMRI dataset facilitates future re-analysis that addresses cross-linguistic commonalities and differences in the neural substrate of language processing on multiple perceptual and linguistic levels.
Other physiological measures
If you don’t have the cash or the inclination to go down the neuro route, other physiological measures that can serve as indirect indicators of particular types of response.
Ravja, N., Saari, T., Kallinen, K., and Laarni, J. (2006). The role of mood in the processing of media messages from a small screen: Effects on subjective and physiological responses. Media Psychology, 8(3), 239-265.
Facial EMG measures muscle activity in the face by detecting and amplifying the electrical pulses generated when muscle fibres contract; the focus is usually on two major muscles groups associated with frowning and smiling respectively. This study used facial electromyography (facial EMG) and cardiac heartbeat intervals as indicators of valence and arousal in the emotional reception of verbal versus video messages in different starting mood conditions and with different levels of relevance to the participants. Participants were also asked to rate their emotional reactions on a valence scale consisting of 9 pictures of human faces with expressions ranging from a severe frown to a broad smile. The researchers found higher relevance, arousal, and associated muscular activity for the verbal condition when in a depressed mood, and the reverse when in a joyful, relaxed, or playful mood.
Riese, Bayer, Lauer, and Schacht. (2014). Pupillary responses to suspense in literary classics. Scientific Study of Literature, 4(2), 211-232.
Pupil dilation is well known to correlate with arousal (see also Troscianko et al., 2011, in Probes during reading above), and also to be related to attention. This study investigated feelings of suspense using pupillometry while participants listened to recordings of passages from Fontane and Storm. Detailed suspense ratings had previously been obtained from expert and nonexpert readings using two different methods: applying an 11-point scale to each sentence in printed copies of the texts, or listening to the texts being read while noting the suspense value (also on a scale from 0 to 10) at the end of each line of the transcript, in both cases relying on subjective appraisal rather than technical reasoning. Significant correlations were found between pupil diameter and changing arc of suspense, offering evidence for the usefulness of this technique as an indicator of suspense.
Dunbar, R. I. M., Teasdale, B., Thompson, J., Budelmann, F., Duncan, S., van Emde Boas, E., & Maguire, L. (2016). Emotional arousal when watching drama increases pain threshold and social bonding. Royal Society Open Science, 3(9), 160288.
Tests the hypothesis that emotionally arousing drama, in particular, triggers the same neurobiological mechanism (the endorphin system, reflected in increased pain thresholds) that underpins anthropoid primate and human social bonding. The results show that, compared to participants who watch an emotionally neutral film, those who watch an emotionally arousing film have increased pain thresholds and an increased sense of group bonding. Participants completed two rating scales (one measuring inclusion-of-other-in-self, the other positive and negative affect) and a pain threshold test (how long they could sit unsupported with their back against a wall) before and after viewing.
Indirect behavioural measures
On the behavioural side of things, too, indirect measures can be useful, though the benefit of not needing to rely on verbal self-report is countered by the lack of certainty that a given measure reflects the variable you think it does, and only that one.
Bryant, D. J., Tversky, B., and Franklin, N. (1992). Internal and external spatial frameworks for representing described scenes. Journal of Memory and Language, 31, 74-98.
Explored readers’ mental models of narrative scenes described from the perspective of either an observer within the scene, surrounded by objects, or one outside the scene, with objects in front (and spatial relations described relative to other objects not the observer). Participants were asked questions about the locations of objects, and their reaction times differed for the two conditions, with faster responses to questions of front than back in the internal condition (reflecting physiological constants), no difference between front and back questions in the external condition (where the body axis is irrelevant), and responses faster overall to questions answered from an external perspective. Subsequent experiments configured descriptions from the perspective of a central person or inanimate object, leaving the reader freer to choose what perspective to adopt. This method offers a way of ascertaining the perspective readers adopt in response to a text where perspective is unspecified or complex.
Zwaan, R. A., Radvansky, G. A., Hilliard, A. E., and Curiel, J. M. (1998). Constructing multidimensional situation models during reading. Scientific Studies of Reading, 2(3), 199-220.
Used reading times to investigate which dimensions (time, space, physical and psychological causation, protagonist motivation, and new protagonists) of the mental model, or situation model, are monitored by readers of narrative, finding that the spatial dimension was the only one not monitored (i.e. spatial discontinuities did not lead to increased reading times). The spatial dimension was brought into line with the others in a second experiment where participants memorised a map of the building in which the described events took place, which encouraged them to monitor spatial continuity as they would otherwise not bother to do.
Emmott, C., Sanford, A. J., and Dawydiak, E. J. (2007). Stylistics meets cognitive science: Studying style in fiction and readers’ attention from an interdisciplinary perspective. Style, 41(2), 204-224.
Outlines the principles and practice of ‘depth of processing’ testing, with literary relevance in the realm of foregrounding devices in particular. Traditional methods and the newer ‘change detection’ method are introduced, the latter adapted for verbal texts from vision research on the phenomenon of change blindness. A study is described to assess the effects of ‘attention-capturing’ devices at different linguistic and narrative levels, with a surprising finding that narrative foregrounding actually reduces change detection demanding further exploration.
Zacks, J. M., Speer, N. K., and Reynolds, J. R. (2009). Segmentation in reading and film comprehension. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 138(2), 307-327.
Applied the reading-times method to test a hypothesis about how readers use natural boundaries in ongoing activity evoked in narrative film as an important part of comprehension. The set of experiments involved collecting reading times, segmentation judgements (press a button when you judge that one meaningful unit of activity has ended and another begun), and predictability ratings (also gathered during the viewing), plus cued recall questions to test comprehension for a film that had been pre-coded for situational changes. In this study, interactions between variables of situation change in the film and patterns of segmentation and reading times were analysed at an individual level, rather than just using group-averaged reading times; good agreement about event boundaries was found between individuals, but consistency was better within individuals.
Whalen, D. H., Zunshine, L., and Holquist, M. (2012). Theory of Mind and embedding of perspective: A psychological test of a literary ‘sweet spot’. Scientific Study of Literature, 2(2), 301-315.
Reading times alongside comprehension questions of varying difficulty were used to test a hypothesis about theory of mind and literature: that three levels of perspective embedding might provide a helpful amount information about characters without overwhelming, and that this ‘sweet spot’ could be preferred in part thanks to ease of processing. A second study imposed a fixed reading speed based on the average reading times from the first experiment. Both found that degree of perspective embedding affected cognitive engagement, with zero embedding read slower than 1-3 levels, and about the same as 4 levels, while comprehension error increased only with 5 levels.
Content analysis / discourse analysis / stylometrics
In this final section, we turn to methods directed at the texts themselves, rather than at readers’ responses to them.
Content analysis software
Coh-Metrix
Funnels into a range of basic descriptive indices, plus outputs for dimensions including word concreteness, syntactic simplicity, referential cohesion (words and ideas that overlap across sentences and the entire text), deep cohesion (causal and intentional connectives), verb cohesion (overlapping verbs), connectivity (explicit conveying of logical connections), temporality, and narrativity), as well as measures for similarity between adjacent sentences, lexical diversity, situation model construction, syntactic complexity and pattern density, words before the main verb (an index of working memory load), word information, and readability.
Free online trial versions of the web tools plus extensive documentation are available here: http://cohmetrix.com. A free text analysis service for corpora over 15,000 words is also on offer.
LIWC (pronounced Luke): Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count dictionary
Contains 4,500 words and word stems, filed in one or more of around 80 outputs: 4 general descriptor categories (total word count, words per sentence, % of words captured by the dictionary, % of words longer than 6 letters), 22 standard linguistic dimensions (e.g. % of words that are pronouns, auxiliary verbs, etc.), 32 word categories tapping psychological constructs (e.g. affect, cognition, biological processes), 7 personal concern categories (e.g. work, home, leisure activities), 3 paralinguistic dimensions (assents, fillers, nonfluencies), and 12 punctuation categories. See http://www.liwc.net/LIWC2007LanguageManual.pdf for the development and psychometric properties, and https://www.liwc.app/buy to buy. The academic version currently costs £84.95 for an unlimited licence, or £9.95 for 30 days.
Word norm data
Word norm databases are language corpora that have been rated by human participants along a specific dimension or set of dimensions. They provide an empirically validated way of evaluating rich linguistic data without resorting to qualitative methods, which are unavoidably subjective and usually low in replicability. The two papers below outline VAD norms (valence, arousal, and dominance—dimensions of emotional response) and sensorimotor norms (touch, hearing, smell, taste, vision, and interoception).
Lynott, D., Connell, L., Brysbaert, M., Brand, J., & Carney, J. (2019). The Lancaster sensorimotor norms: Multidimensional measures of perceptual and action strength for 40,000 English words. Behavior Research Methods, 1-21.
Warriner, A. B., Kuperman, V., & Brysbaert, M. (2013). Norms of valence, arousal, and dominance for 13,915 English lemmas. Behavior research methods, 45(4), 1191-1207.
General advocacies
Graesser, A. C., Dowell, N., and Moldovan, C. (2011). A computer’s understanding of literature. Scientific Study of Literature, 1(1), 24-33.
An introduction to how and why to use LIWC and Coh-Metrix to analyse literary texts.
Pennebaker, J. W., and Ireland, M.E. (2011). Using literature to understand authors: The case for computerized text analysis. Scientific Study of Literature, 1(1), 34-48.
Makes a general case for the importance of analysing ‘almost-invisible function words’ (pronouns, prepositions, etc.) rather than just ‘content’ words to learn about the social and psychological worlds of the authors who created them.
Quantitative methods
Zöllner, K. (1990). ‘Quotation analysis’ as a means of understanding comprehension processes of longer and more difficult texts. Poetics, 19, 293-322.
Quotation analysis is presented as a method for explaining and predicting which sections of well-known texts are quoted from and interpreted more frequently than others, which can in turn help us understand the semantic and structural makeup of ‘classical’ texts. The paper sets out the method used to code quotations and interpretations of VIPs (very important passages) from Gulliver’s Travels for analysis, and draws out points of interest such as the high polyvalence of VIPs and the purposes for which they are used, and how certain interpretations become classics in their own right.
Anderson, T., and Crossley, S. (2011) ‘Rue with a difference’: A computational stylistic analysis of the rhetoric of suicide in Hamlet. In M. Ravassat and J. Culpeper (Eds), Stylistics and Shakespeare’s language: Transdisciplinary approaches, pp. 192-214. London: Continuum.
Demonstrates the complementarity of stylistic and literary interpretations using lexico-semantic and corpus approaches to analyse Hamlet’s and Ophelia’s dialogue for suicidal discourse, to reveal semantic prosodies and multiword meaning structures that have been overlooked by literary critics. Using the LIWC, and with Horatio’s and Laertes’s dialogue as controls, the authors construct and test specific linguistic hypotheses about suicidal rhetoric in the play.
Egbert, J. (2012). Style in nineteenth century fiction: A multi-dimensional analysis. Scientific Study of Literature, 2(2), 167-198.
This paper presents a study of a large, principled corpus of 19th-century fiction using a multidimensional corpus stylistics approach which aims to consider ‘the full set of core linguistic features’. The key dimensions of variation are interpreted as ‘thought presentation versus description’, ‘abstract exposition versus concrete action’, and ‘dialogue versus narrative’, and can be used to compare authorial styles and assess the level of variation within novels by the same author.
Nichols, R., Lynn, J., Purzycki, B. G. (2014). Toward a science of science fiction: Applying quantitative methods to genre individuation. Scientific Study of Literature, 4(1), 25-45.
To address the question of what genre is, and what distinguishes a genre like science fiction from other genres, this article presents a method of quantitative genre profiling that uses the word categories of the LIWC analyses to test a well-known literary theory in which science fiction offers particular representations of cognition and estrangement, as distinct from fantasy and mystery. Following presentation of the findings on similarities and differences between the three genres, the paper also includes a general discussion of the value of conducting quantitative empirical work on literature and of testing the hypotheses of literary theory.
Bruhn, M. J. (2018). Citation analysis: An empirical approach to professional literary interpretation. Scientific Study of Literature, 8(1), 77-113.
‘This paper presents series of historiometric studies that exemplify the value of “citation analysis” as an empirical approach to professional literary-critical interpretation, especially with respect to the question of the “literariness” of literary texts. Specifically, the studies show that professional interpreters of Wordsworth’s poetry, across more than a century of time and despite widely varying critical approaches, tend to pay more attention to and therefore more frequently cite lines that involve prospective enjambments. Lines involving nominative noun phrase and retrospective enjambments, however, did not reveal the same correlation with frequency of citation. The studies thus suggest that literariness does indeed have a relatively stable textual component that may be discriminated through citation analysis of professional interpretations of individual literary texts by authors writing in distinct genres of literature and in different periods in literary history.’ The method involves collecting interpretations, counting citations, and performing statistical analysis to ask whether the resulting frequencies reveal significant patterns distinguishing the most from the least cited passages.
Dávid-Barrett, T., Carney, J., Rotkirch, A., & Izquierdo, I. B. (2019). Social Network Complexity in Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro. In Evolution and Popular Narrative (pp. 106-118). Brill Rodopi.
This study investigates the number and types of dyadic interactions in the libretto for The Marriage of Figaro, and analyses representations of the social network during the opera. The results suggest that part of this opera’s enduring appeal is its narrative and structural solutions to representing complex and ecologically valid social interactions onstage.
Qualitative methods
Braun, V., and Clarke, V. (2006). Using thematic analysis in psychology. Qualitative Research in Psychology, 3(2), 77-101.
Introduces thematic analysis as an accessible and theoretically flexible way of analysing qualitative data, and clearly outlines the analytical process (including setting out the difference between codes and themes, and how to draw conclusions from the analysis) as well as pitfalls to avoid.
Schreier, M. (2012). Qualitative content analysis in practice. London: Sage.
Also partially available here (good chunks of the key sections are available when signed in)
Covers what qualitative content analysis is, how blurred the boundary is between it and its quantitative sister, and how the coding process works, from how to build and evaluate a coding frame to carrying out the main analysis and presenting the results.
Other methods
A creative category in need of expansion; watch this space! (or contact us if you know of anything fun that could be added)
Yurievich Manin, D. (2012). The right word in the left place: Measuring lexical foregrounding in poetry and prose. Scientific Study of Literature, 2(2), 273-300.
Uses an online literary game where players guess words in fragments of real texts to quantify two aspects of lexical foregrounding—unpredictability and constrainedness (or irreplaceability)—as they help characterise the poetry/prose distinction and illuminate the formal constraints of different poetic forms.
Statistics
And last but not least, with all datasets comes the need to analyse them—and once you want to assess relative probabilities, and hence infer causation, statistics are what you’ll need. Here are some relatively painless ways to get started.
Hoover, D. L. (2008). Quantitative analysis and literary studies. In S. Schreibman and R. Siemens (Eds), A companion to digital literary studies, Ch 28. Oxford: Blackwell.
This article argues for and sketches out the basic principles of quantitative stylometrics, but also includes examples of statistical analysis. (The book also contains chapters on many other aspects of digital literary studies, including a bibliography of online tools and archives.)
https://jmarchini.org/teaching/
This online archive of Jonathan Marchini’s statistics teaching notes provides introductions to basic statistical measures; probability; specific probability models including the binomial, Poisson, and normal distributions; hypothesis testing (including chi-squared tests); error probability; and confidence intervals.
Stanford’s four statistics MOOCs are a good way to familiarise yourself with the basics of describing and drawing conclusions from data:
Intro to statistics with Sebastian Thrun: https://www.class-central.com/mooc/361/udacity-intro-to-statistics
Statistics: The science of decisions, with Sean Laraway, Ronald Rogers, and Katie Kormanik https://www.class-central.com/mooc/631/udacity-statistics-the-science-of-decisions
Intro to descriptive statistics, with Sean Laraway, Ronald Rogers, and Katie Kormanik https://www.class-central.com/mooc/2309/udacity-intro-to-descriptive-statistics
Intro to inferential statistics (follows on from descriptive stats), with Sean Laraway, Ronald Rogers, and Katie Kormanik https://www.class-central.com/mooc/2310/udacity-intro-to-inferential-statistics
They also offer an intro to data science, and courses on data analysis with the open-source package R and programming foundations with Python. See https://www.classcentral.com/university/stanford for the full list.