Reading Emotions

The goal of this project is to improve our understanding of the emotional complexity of literary characters. Characters are the scaffolding of great storytelling. With your help, we are building AI models to better understand the emotions of characters to address one very big question: why are imaginary stories so important to us?

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.