Hi everyone, thank you for coming.

So I will be talking about creative nonfiction and well, we know now how diverse digital

humanities are, right?

And so I will be approaching creative nonfiction specifically from a quantitative corpus linguistic

perspective and thank you Gavin for the introduction into corpus linguistics for the audience today,

so I don't have to do that.

Okay, well when I thought about the theme for this training day, right, fictional text

and real world context, this study immediately came to mind, I did it a while ago and I thought,

well, that's exactly what creative nonfiction is.

So that's why we're going to start with this question.

Well what is this domain really?

It's got this catchy name, creative nonfiction, it's got its own abbreviation, CNF.

So when we look at how it's defined, we mainly get the writer's perspective.

So they say it's a literary genre, but then they immediately add it's the fourth genre,

so it doesn't fit into any of the existing ones, poetry, fiction, drama, so it's the

fourth genre alongside those.

The goal is to tell true stories and this word true is really important for them, right,

So that's the nonfiction component and that's because the stories have to be factually accurate,

but then the stories can be told through a literary lens, so with attention to literary

technique and that's the creative part of the term, right, so that means that there's

attention to character development and point of view and narrative arc, right, so these

literary devices used in creative writing.

And so writers talk about an immense amount of freedom and flexibility that this gives

them, right, as they draw on their memories, their experiences, observations, opinions

of the real world happenings, and so in this way the genre really invites them to push

boundaries.

And so this freedom basically resulted in creative nonfiction becoming an umbrella term

for a wide wide range of different types of texts, right, so here we have memoirs, all

kinds of essays such as personal lyrics, speculative, meditative, collage, braided, you name it,

any kind of essay can happen under this creative nonfiction umbrella.

And then, well, writers end up saying, well, creative nonfiction can really mean anything

and everything, right, different things to different people, and that's exactly the characteristic

that makes it so elusive but also so alluring.

Okay, well, to summarize all that, well, some parts of this can be really informative but

others not so much because we see that there's little agreement on what CNF actually is,

right, because of how broad it is and because it's still evolving, and yet it's gained

a lot of traction, at least in the American context where this study was done.

We see major social issues being presented through the lens of creative nonfiction, acclaimed

writers and literary journals apply the term to their published works, the classes in

creative nonfiction, in creative writing graduate programs at universities, right, so the medium

and the term have gained a lot of traction.

But as a linguist, what you would notice is that all of these descriptions come from a

rhetorical or literary perspective, right, so we're learning from the writers themselves

what it is that they produce, but there is no linguistic account of this register or

genre or text variety, whatever term you want to use, and a linguistic account would mean

a focus on the specific linguistic features, specific linguistic characteristics of these

texts, right, so how do, what are these texts actually comprised of, right, how do writers

create these texts?

And that was my motivation here, so what does this emerging register look like linguistically?

What linguistic resources do the writers have at that disposal as they create these works?