October 6-9 2026

Aarhus University, Sandbjerg Estate

Deadline: June 15, 2026

The aim of this interdisciplinary scholarly retreat is to bring together researchers from all fields working with the intersection of AI and storytelling to reflect on and discuss how we study narratives that are no longer authored, circulated, or experienced exclusively by humans. 

New practices of storytelling are emerging and existing ones are transformed with the popular uptake of LLM-based chatbots across professional, public, and recreational settings. Today, LLM-infused storytelling impacts all forms of textual practice: from art and creative writing to journalism, politics, and public debate over marketing, SoMe, and influencer culture to everyday conversations, therapy, and intimate interactions, to name a few. For scholars working with narratives, these developments pose fundamental challenges, several of which revolve around questions of method. We invite contributions that address issues of methodology in this evolving landscape of human-machine narration. 

Relevant topics include, but are not limited to:

• How can existing qualitative methods (e.g., close reading, positioning analysis, rhetorical analysis, interviews) and existing quantitative methods be adapted or revised to meet these new narrative practices?
  
• How can narrative theory account for human–machine co-creation?
  
• How can we analyze the ways in which interactions with LLM-based chatbots transform the generation and reception of core narrative elements such as story, discourse, and narrative act?
  
• What kind of data do we need and what analytical approaches can be developed to understand narration with and to chatbots?
  
• How do we analyze the way LLM-platform infrastructures (e.g., training data, guardrails, alignments) shape or create narrative practices?
  
• How can core story-related concepts within narrative theory, literary theory, rhetoric, journalism studies, psychology, linguistics, and media studies such as ‘intentionality’, ‘causality’, ‘agency’, ‘purpose’, ‘author’, ‘meaning’, and ‘origin’ be rethought and investigated empirically in light of the current transformation?
  
• What forms of data, evidence, and interpretation emerge through human-machine storytelling?
  
• How do we work, critically and reflected, from a starting point of corporate and technological black boxing by Big Tech?
  
• How can the interdisciplinary development of methods to unpack AI-storytelling be pursued and ensured?
  

To start answering questions such as these, the seminar invites for contributions that may be exploratory or programmatic, fully formed or work in progress; the format is based around 30 minutes presentations from each participant. We hope the seminar will lead into a publication on methods, storytelling, and generative AI. Confirmed seminar participants and speakers are Alexandra Georgakopoulou (King’s College, UK) and Torsa Ghosal (California State University, US).

Practical information

• Seminar dates: 6-9 October 2026
  
• Abstract submission deadline: 15 June 2026
  
• Notification of acceptance: 25 June 2026
  

The seminar is free and all accommodation expenses are covered. Travel expenses must be covered individually.

Submission: Send abstract (max 250 words) and a short bio (max. 100 words) to norsi@cc.au.dk

Organisers: Associate Professor Stefan Iversen, Assistant Professor Ann-Katrine S. Nielsen, Postdoc Pernille Meyer, all Aarhus University, Denmark

Funding: The seminar is funded by the research project GAITS (IRDF 2026–2030)

This HMN Seminar (short for Human-Machine narration) is organized by GAITS (https://projects.au.dk/gaits) and takes place at the Sandbjerg Estate in Southern Denmark October 6-9, 2026. It welcomes a limited number of participants to allow for in-depth discussions and shared conceptual development. The seminar is free and all accommodation expenses are covered. Travel expenses must be covered individually.

Apply by sending a brief bio and a 250-word abstract, describing your ongoing work with methods, storytelling, and generative AI to Stefan Iversen (norsi@cc.au.dk) no later than June 15, 2026.