Are You There God? Lightweight Narrative Annotation of Christian Fiction with LMs
This provides a computational method for literary scholars to study under-researched Christian Fiction, though it is incremental in applying existing models to a new domain.
The paper tackled the problem of analyzing divine acts in Christian Fiction by developing a lightweight language model to annotate 'acts of God', showing it matches human annotations and revealing differences between the Left Behind series and broader Christian Fiction.
In addition to its more widely studied cultural movements, American Evangelicalism has a well-developed but less externally visible literary side. Christian Fiction, however, has been little studied, and what scholarly attention there is has focused on the explosively popular Left Behind series. In this work, we use computational tools to provide both a broad topical overview of Christian Fiction as a genre and a more directed exploration of how its authors depict divine acts. Working with human annotators, we first developed a codebook for identifying "acts of God." We then adapted the codebook for use by a recent, lightweight LM with the assistance of a much larger model. The laptop-scale LM is largely capable of matching human annotations, even when the task is subtle and challenging. Using these annotations, we show that significant and meaningful differences exist between divine acts depicted by the Left Behind books and Christian Fiction more broadly.