A Greenhouse research talk by Ivana Zajc. All are welcome.
What happens when stories are read not only by humans, but also by machines? How can we look at stories from a distance? This lecture explores how computers “read” literature by detecting patterns, structures, and emotional signals across texts using digital humanities methods such as text mining and sentiment analysis. By turning narratives into data, computational approaches reveal connections and dynamics that often remain invisible to close reading alone. Rather than competing with interpretation, machine reading opens new, provocative ways of thinking about how stories create meaning and emotion.
Ivana Zajc (she/her) is assistant professor at the Research Centre for the Humanities, School of Humanities, University of Nova Gorica, Slovenia. She works in the fields of digital humanities, literary theory, narratology, literary didactics, and the history of emotions. She is the principal investigator of the ARIS-funded basic research project Forms of Shame in Slovenian Literature and is involved in several other research projects. At the University of Nova Gorica, she teaches a wide range of undergraduate and graduate courses, including Academic Writing, Digital Humanities, Literature and Emotions, Critical Writing in the Arts, and Contemporary Literary Theories.