Digital Ecocriticism: Moving beyond anthropocentrism in the contemporary French novel

Project Information

DigEco

Grant agreement ID: 101109448

DOI

10.3030/101109448

Project terminated on 16 October 2024

EC signature date 21 April 2023

Start date 1 January 2024

End date 31 December 2025

Funded under

• Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA)

Total cost

No data

EU contribution

€ 211 754,88

Coordinated by

SORBONNE UNIVERSITE
France

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - DigEco (Digital Ecocriticism: Moving beyond anthropocentrism in the contemporary French novel)

Reporting period: 2024-01-01 to 2025-12-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

As environmental challenges intensify, literature plays a crucial role in shaping public awareness and ecological consciousness. The DigEco project explores how contemporary French and Francophone fiction ( 800 Novels between 2001–2021) reflects environmental themes, focusing on biodiversity, geographical space, and nonhuman agency. By integrating Digital Humanities and Ecocriticism, DigEco applies AI-driven text analysis to uncover how literature engages with environmental discourse.

The project aligns with EU policy priorities, including the European Green Deal and the EU Biodiversity Strategy 2030, by examining how fiction contributes to climate awareness and sustainability narratives. DigEco’s objectives are:

Tracking Biodiversity in Fiction – Identifying ecological terms and their evolution in literary texts.

Mapping Geographical Representations – Analyzing shifts in the depiction of natural and urban spaces.

Investigating Nonhuman Agency – Assessing how animals and plants are represented as narrative agents.

By leveraging Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Natural Language Processing (NLP), DigEco provides new insights into literature’s evolving role in environmental discourse, benefiting researchers, educators, policymakers, and cultural institutions.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

The project applied computational methods to analyze 800 contemporary novels, focusing on three key areas:

✅ Biodiversity Analysis: Developed a lexicographical database based on the Loterre biodiversity lexicon (CNRS), identifying 746 biodiversity-related terms and tracking their usage trends over two decades.
✅ Geospatial Mapping: Implemented a Named Entity Recognition (NER) tool to extract and analyze place names, analyzing literary focus on ecological landscapes.
✅ Nonhuman Agency Study: Used AI models (GPT-4 API and FlauBERT) to study literal representations of animals and plants distinguish figurative vs. literal representations of animals and plants, analyzing a shift toward decentering human perspectives in fiction.

Key Achievements:

Innovative Research Methodology: First large-scale computational ecocritical study of contemporary French fiction.

New Digital Tools: AI-driven text mining and mapping techniques tailored for ecological literary analysis.

Empirical Evidence: Provided quantitative insights into how literature engages with biodiversity and nonhuman perspectives.

Open Science Contribution: Published datasets and methodologies in open-access repositories, supporting future research.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

DigEco advances Digital Ecocriticism by pioneering AI-driven computational methods to analyze literature. It moves beyond traditional qualitative literary analysis, offering quantitative, large-scale insights.

First AI-Assisted Ecocritical Study – Applied Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Named Entity Recognition (NER) to explore ecological themes across a vast literary corpus in French.
New Biodiversity Lexicon for Literature – Developed a taxonomy of 746 ecological terms, providing measurable data on literature’s engagement with biodiversity.
Geospatial Literary Analysis – Created an automated place-name extraction tool, revealing trends in the portrayal of natural spaces.
AI-Based Study of Nonhuman Agency – Used syntactic and semantic analysis to analyze literary focus on nonhuman narratives.

Future Directions

Expansion of methodology to multilingual literary corpora. Integration with biodiversity databases to enhance interdisciplinary collaboration. Development of AI-powered tools for figurative language detection in fiction. Contribution to digital education by incorporating findings into environmental humanities curricula.