Daniel Candel, Francisco Sáez & Sergio Abellán

This department within the lab approaches narrative centres as sites of collaborative studies. Collaborative studies are either interdisciplinary or work with larger corpora. Our lab specializes in corpora of intermediate sizes, an underdeveloped niche within narrative studies. This kind of research distinguishes itself by combining non-digital reading with ‘digital’ strategies, such as operationalizing theory, isolating rich data sets or recognizing uniform patterns and deviance through systematic correlation. This yields reliable results of a comparative nature and which are unattainable through individual or digital research. There are two ways of reading corpora of intermediate size: manual-distant (non-digital distant reading) and close-operationalized (close reading informed by operationalization). These different readings tend to be defined by the size of their corpora – a hundred the first, one to two dozen the second. We perform the second kind of reading. We have worked with teams of different sizes, analyzed different kinds of narratives (movies, sequels and TV series), and published our work in the Q1 journals Semiotica (2017), Quarterly Review of Film and Video (2021) and English Text Construction (2021).