From critical analysis to formal representation: literary characters, interpretations, and ontologies
Dipartimento di lettere e filosofia, via Tommaso Gar, 14, 38122 Trento TN, 21-23 October 2025
Online as well as onsite participation will be possible. Please let us known through the following form.
For information relative to the workshop, please write to: miteprinpnrr@gmail.com
Tentative program (to be refined; see abstracts below )
DAY 1 (21/10)
(discussants: Roberta Ferrario and Iuris Mocchiutti)
9:30-10:15 Introduction and presentation of MITE
10:15-11:00 Evelyn Gius (Technical University of Darmstadt) Computational Narratology between Text Surface, Deeper Structure and Readers
11:00-11:30 BREAK
(discussant: Alessandro Mosca)
11:30 – 12:15 Federico Pianzola (University of Groningen) The GOLEM Ontology for Narrative and Fiction
12:15-13:00 Sara Tonelli (Fondazione Bruno Kessler) Human Label Variation in Linguistic Annotation
13:00-14:30 Lunch BREAK
(discussant: Gaia Tomazzoli)
14:30-15:15 Stefano Ballerio (University of Milan) «He was one of us». Sul giudizio morale in Lord Jim di Joseph Conrad
15:15-16:00 Heloísa Abreu de Lima (Sapienza University of Rome) tba
16:00-16:30 BREAK
16:30-17:15 Panel (tba) (discussants: Claudio Masolo and Emanuele Bottazzi)
DAY 2 (22/10)
(discussant: Heloísa Abreu de Lima)
9:30-10:15 Elena Porciani (Università della Campania ‘Luigi Vanvitelli’) L’invenzione delle personagge. Ragioni teoriche e pratica genealogica
10:15-11:00 Gaia Tomazzoli (Sapienza University of Rome) tba
11:00-11:30 BREAK
(discussant: Jansan Favazzo )
11:30 – 12:15 Enrico Terrone (University of Genoa) The Experiential Function of Fictional Characters
12:15-13:00 Michele Paolini Paoletti (University of Macerata) Ficta and their Powerful Identity: A Case Study from Paul Auster’s 4 3 2 1
13:00-14:30 Lunch BREAK
(discussant: Marco Buzzoni)
14:30-15:15 Francesco Orilia (University of Macerata) tba
15:15-16:00 Emar Maier (University of Groningen) Picturing fictional characters
16:00-16:30 BREAK
16:30-17:15 Jansan Favazzo (University of Macerata), Fiction, Identity, and Existence: A Study in Experimental Philosophy
17:15-18:00 Panel tba
DAY 3 (23/10)
(discussant: Claudio Masolo)
9:30-10:15 Carlo Meghini (CNR ISTI) tba
10:15-11:00 Emilio M. Sanfilippo (CNR ISTC) tba
11:00-11:15 BREAK
11:15 – 12:00 Final discussion (all)
Stefano Ballerio, Università degli Studi di Milano
Title: «He was one of us». Sul giudizio morale in Lord Jim di Joseph Conrad
La mia relazione verte su Lord Jim (1900) di Joseph Conrad e in particolare sul suo protagonista Jim. Vorrei soffermarmi sui diversi giudizi morali dei quali Jim è oggetto, sia nella finzione romanzesca, sia nella ricezione. Per il gesto che determina il suo destino, l’abbandono del Patna e dei suoi passeggeri, Jim è ripetutamente giudicato da numerosi personaggi che incontra nel seguito della sua storia o che di quella storia, anche senza incontrarlo, vengono a sapere, e inoltre dal suo narratore Marlow e da se stesso. Al di là della finzione romanzesca, gli interpreti dell’opera hanno discusso a loro volta la figura morale di Jim. Vorrei osservare questi diversi giudizi e riflettere su come funzioni il giudizio morale nella narrativa romanzesca. Oltre alla letteratura critica sul romanzo e sulla narrativa di Conrad in generale, i riferimenti principali potrebbero essere Michail Bachtin, con le sue considerazioni sul rapporto fra autore ed eroe, per la questione dei giudizi morali all’interno della finzione, e l’ermeneutica gadameriana, per la questione dei giudizi morali da parte dei lettori.
Jansan Favazzo (University of Macerata)
Title: Fiction, Identity, and Existence: A Study in Experimental Philosophy
The category of fictional entities (ficta, in short) is highly controversial and extensively debated in contemporary metaphysics. Within the MITE project, we conducted an empirical study through questionnaire administration aimed at testing the following hypotheses. With respect to the identity of ficta, (1a) the construct validity of our theoretical assessment, and (1b) whether it can be observed a commonsensical response to the identity conundrums raised by ficta. With respect to the existence of ficta, (2) whether it can be identified a commonsensical opinion about the ontological and metaphysical status of ficta (respectively, whether ficta are genuine entities and, if so, what kind of entities they are). Moreover, with respect to both, (3) whether there is a significant difference in response between laypeople and people with a strong background either in the philosophical or in the literary field.
Evelyn Gius (Technical University of Darmstadt)
Title: Computational Narratology between Text Surface, Deeper Structure and Readers
For analyzing plot-related phenomena, we have been working on different levels of granularity with relation to different features of the narrative in the past years. In this talk, I will present this work with a focus on overarching questions of operationalization. Our approach takes into account the narratological modeling of narratives which ranges from analysis of textual representation over the identification of deep structures to questions of reader responses. The idea is that this is also a more successful approach to automated analysis of narratives than approaches relying on textual analysis based on surface features only. We therefore combine textual features with general narrative („deep“) structure as well as, to some extent, reader’s perception.
Gerstorfer, Dominik, and Evelyn Gius. 2025. “Operationalizing Operationalizing.” In DHd2025, 345–48. Bielefeld. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.14943080.
Gius, Evelyn, and Michael Vauth. 2022. “Towards an Event Based Plot Model. A Computational Narratology Approach.” Journal of Computational Literary Studies 1 (1). https://doi.org/10.48694/jcls.110.
Hatzel, Hans Ole, Haimo Stiemer, Chris Biemann, and Evelyn Gius. 2023. “Machine Learning in Computational Literary Studies.” Edited by Hubert Mara and Ricardo Usbeck. It – Information Technology, August. https://doi.org/10.1515/itit-2023-0041.
Emar Maier (University of Groningen)
Title: Picturing fictional characters
The fictional characters typically discussed in philosophy — Odysseus, Sherlock Holmes, Hamlet — originate in poems, novels, or plays. They are created and subsequently referred to by means of words. Philosophers of language and linguists have developed theories to model and understand how this works, theorizing about the semantics of fictional names in terms of mental files, discourse referents, fiction-making speech acts, intensional fiction-operators, imagination etc.. But fiction is not restricted to the linguistic domain of spoken, written, or signed language. We can create rich fictional worlds and engaging characters in non-verbal media like comics and film, where storytelling involves the presentation of sequences of pictorial rather than linguistic units of information (i.e., panels in comics, shots in film). But what are the analogues of fictional names or discourse referents in pictures? How do we create, identify and refer to fictional characters in (silent) movies? I show how we can carry over and deepen the insights from semantic/pragmatic investigations of fictional characters and linguistic storytelling into these visual media, by extending formal theories of discourse coherence (specifically SDRT) with a formal theory of picture semantics (based on geometric projection). In short, this talk aims to connect my analysis of referring to fictional characters via discourse referents (Maier 2017), with my recent work on pictorial content (Maier 2025).
Maier, E. (2017). Fictional names in psychologistic semantics. Theoretical Linguistics 43(1-2). https://doi.org/10.1515/tl-2017-0001
Maier, E. (2025). Pictorial language and linguistics. Ms. Groningen. To appear in The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Linguistics, edited by Gabriel Dupré, Kate Stanton, and Ryan Nefdt. https://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/007603
Michele Paolini Paoletti (University of Macerata)
Title: Ficta and their Powerful Identity: A Case Study from Paul Auster’s 4 3 2 1
In his novel 4 3 2 1, Paul Auster explores four possible lives of Archie Ferguson, a Jewish guy born in March 1947 and living in New Jersey. The novel aims at showing how luck and coincidences may shape one’s life, leading to radically different outcomes. But – to philosophers – it also presents a dilemma about the identity of fictional characters (or ficta) within one and the same work of fiction. Indeed, if Archie Ferguson is numerically the same fictum across all of his possible lives, he turns out to have radically different and inconsistent features. On the other hand, if each ‘version’ of Archie Ferguson actually is a fictum in its own right, this is literally at odds with there being multiple ‘versions’ of the same fictum. In this talk, I shall suggest that there is a way to preserve the numerical identity of Archie Ferguson as a fictum across all of his possible lives. This consists in allowing that the identity of at least some ficta is also or only fixed by the powers they have according to the relevant stories, i.e., by properties of the form: being able to do M/become M (in circumstances C). More precisely, the identity of Archie Ferguson across all of his possible lives is also or only fixed by certain powers that have certain features: first, they have relatively generic manifestations (thus allowing for the realization of distinct subtypes of manifestations falling under the same type); secondly, they are endowed with specific degrees of ‘strength’, grounding the higher/lesser probabilities that such powers get manifested; thirdly, such degrees of ‘strength’ (and the corresponding probabilities) may be affected by external circumstances.
Elena Porciani (Università della Campania ‘Luigi Vanvitelli’)
Title: L’invenzione delle personagge. Ragioni teoriche e pratica genealogica
Nel mio intervento proporrò una riflessione sul concetto di personaggia, ‘inventato’ dalla Società Italiana delle Letterate a partire dal 2009, adottato da alcune studiose in una prospettiva letteraria e visuale di genere, ma mai sottoposto a un’effettiva elaborazione teorica. Mi propongo, in particolare, di indagare le ragioni d’essere della personaggia individuandone la specificità in una dimensione genealogico-femminista che costituisce una variante di genere nei fenomeni di costruzione e ricezione dei tesi narrativi.
Federico Pianzola (University of Groningen)
Title: The GOLEM Ontology for Narrative and Fiction
This talk introduces the GOLEM ontology, a novel framework designed to provide a structured and computationally tractable representation of narrative and fictional elements. Addressing limitations in existing ontologies regarding the integration of fictional entities and diverse narrative theories, our model extends CIDOC CRM and LRMoo, and leverages DOLCE’s cognitive foundations to provide a flexible and interoperable framework. The ontology captures complexities of narrative structure, character dynamics, and fictional worlds, while supporting provenance tracking and pluralistic interpretations. The modular structure facilitates alignment with various literary and narrative theories and integration of external resources. Future work will focus on expanding domain-specific extensions, validating the model through larger-scale case studies, and developing a reader response module to systematically model the reception of narratives. By fostering interoperability between literary theory, fan cultures, and computational analysis, this ontology lays a foundation for interoperable comparative research on narrative and fiction.
Project website: https://golemlab.eu
SPARQL endpoint: http://graph.golemlab.eu:8890/sparql
Web interface for the knowledge graph: http://search.golemlab.eu:3006
Ontology for Narrative and Fiction: https://github.com/GOLEM-lab/golem-ontology/wiki
Enrico Terrone (University of Genoa)
Title: The Experiential Function of Fictional Characters
If one assumes both the ontological view according to which fictional characters are abstract artifacts and the metaphysical view according to which artifacts essentially have functions, one should conclude that fictional characters have functions and specify which those are. I will argue that fictional characters have the function of generating peculiar configurations of mental states that involve not only imagination and emotions directed toward the fictional character as an imaginary flesh-and-blood individual but also attention to the structural and genetic features of the fictional character as an artifact.
(2023) “Taking Abstract Artifacts Seriously. The Functioning and Malfunctioning of Fictional Characters”, in “Fiction and Metaphysics”, eds. Frederick Kroon and Alberto Voltolini, Philosophies, 2023, 8, 6, 105, DOI: https://doi.org/10.3390/philosophies8060105
(2021) “Twofileness. A Functionalist Approach to Fictional Characters and Mental Files”, Erkenntnis, 86, pp. 129-147, DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10670-018-0097-2
(2017) “On Fictional Characters as Types”, British Journal of Aesthetics, 57, 2, pp. 161-176.
Sara Tonelli (Fondazione Bruno Kessler)
Title: Human Label Variation in Linguistic Annotation
Human label variation (Plank, 2022) reflects different aspects of linguistic annotation, from annotators’ subjectivity to sloppiness or lack of enough context to interpret a text, as well as genuine disagreement due to multiple plausible labels. However, this poses several challenges concerning both the interpretation of the annotated linguistic datasets and the implementation of annotation systems that should be trained on “gold data”. In this talk I will present ongoing research in the NLP community around the topic of human label variation, covering new practices for linguistic annotation, shared tasks, evaluation methodologies and classification approaches.
Alan Ramponi, Agnese Daffara, and Sara Tonelli. 2025. Fine-grained Fallacy Detection with Human Label Variation. In Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 762–784, Albuquerque, New Mexico. Association for Computational Linguistics. https://aclanthology.org/2025.naacl-long.34/
Marta Sandri, Elisa Leonardelli, Sara Tonelli, and Elisabetta Jezek. 2023. Why Don’t You Do It Right? Analysing Annotators’ Disagreement in Subjective Tasks. In Proceedings of the 17th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 2428–2441, Dubrovnik, Croatia. Association for Computational Linguistics. https://aclanthology.org/2023.eacl-main.178/
Elisa Leonardelli, Stefano Menini, Alessio Palmero Aprosio, Marco Guerini, and Sara Tonelli. 2021. Agreeing to Disagree: Annotating Offensive Language Datasets with Annotators’ Disagreement. In Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 10528–10539, Online and Punta Cana, Dominican Republic. Association for Computational Linguistics. https://aclanthology.org/2021.emnlp-main.822/