My approach to annotating over 300 short stories using a shared schema or framework seeks to track several features related to character demographics, character dialogue, and geography-setting references.
These categories are derived from features that literary scholars already analyze yet encoding or organizing them in such a way facilitates our ability to perform computational analysis across several texts. Instead of reading stories in isolation, the framework makes their internal architecture visible and comparable. A professor teaching “The Gilded Six Bits” by Zora Neale Hurston, for instance, could discover other stories that focus on an extramarital affair, or a person reading “Battle Royal” by Ralph Ellison can focus on other stories that incorporate flashbacks.
Once these features are marked up consistently, we can compare stories across writers and even historical periods to see where patterns repeat and where they diverge. We can identify stories that rely on concentrated speech between only women characters, stories structured around private spaces like a bedroom inside a family home or stories that focus on characters from a certain region or with specific attributes. Those comparisons provide the basis for grouping texts by craft and creative features rather than by period alone.
Therefore, by creating a scaffolding for short stories, this project attempts to create a more durable way of discussing short stories in the field by building an infrastructure necessary for classification and sustained comparison.
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