Literary Lab Explores Why We Feel Suspense: You're sitting on the edge of your seat. Your heart starts racing. You scream aloud, "Don't open that door!"

A neural network is a computer program that receives inputs on how to categorize certain objects and can be trained to learn how to identify new objects on its own. In this case, they trained the neural network to recognize suspenseful passages based on the sets of words and topics associated with suspense and their data on what readers had identified as moments of high suspense.

The neural network achieved 81 percent accuracy in identifying passages it had never seen before as either suspenseful or non-suspenseful.

"I was shocked. This was not supposed to work," said Algee-Hewitt. "The very fact that something that is so subjective and affective can be somewhat accurately predicted based on formal features of a text is one of the more surprising things we've come across."

Although creating a program that can detect suspense was not an initial goal of the project, it did help the scholars understand what truly creates suspense. By analyzing what words and topics the neural network relied on most when identifying suspenseful passages, they arrived at their conclusion about words that create what Algee-Hewitt calls epistemological uncertainty.

"This is one of the places where digital humanities research for me is most exciting, because very frequently, either the results will not be what you expect or you wind up finding something you weren't looking for to begin with," he said.

Because of the wide-ranging historical span of texts that the group looked at, from the 18th through 20th centuries, the project required a large number of scholars with different areas of specialization.

"We ended up with a pretty good historical coverage between British and American expertise, so it's actually a huge part of what has allowed the project to be possible," said Tasha Eccles, an English doctoral candidate.

Not only has the project required a large group of participants, it has yielded a collaborative form of research that is unusual for the humanities.

"I think it's been eye-opening to me to see that academic work can happen in many different ways," said Abigail Droge, an English doctoral candidate.

The group hopes to produce a co-authored publication, which will include both the results from the group as a whole and essays on individual projects of interest that relate to suspense.

Editor's Note: It's mentioned that the group are using a detailed comparative analysis of "suspenseful" texts from 1750 to the present day. We've asked for the list of at least some of the texts and will let you know if we've received them.

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Literary Lab Explores Why We Feel Suspense: You're sitting on the edge of your seat. Your heart starts racing. You scream aloud, "Don't open that door!"

Because of the wide-ranging historical span of texts that the group looked at, from the 18th through 20th centuries, the project required a large number of scholars with different areas of specialization.

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