Andrew Piper is Professor in the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at McGill University. His work focuses on using AI to better understand the nature of human storytelling.

He directs .txtlab, a laboratory for cultural analytics, and is the former editor of the Journal of Cultural Analytics. He currently runs the Master’s Program in Digital Humanities at McGill and directs the Citizen Science project “Citizen Readers,” a collection of projects designed to foster more transparent AI for cultural understanding.

He is currently completing a new book called "Why you should read more fiction: What AI can tell us about the embodied mind of storytelling."

His most recent books include Enumerations: Data and Literary Study (Chicago 2018) and Can We Be Wrong? The Problem of Textual Evidence in a Time of Data (Cambridge 2020), which examines the limits of generalizability in literary studies and considers how computational techniques can provide more credible evidentiary frameworks.

You can check out his recent articles that explore the use of AI to understand storytelling, including measuring narrative discourse, story morals surrounding climate change, and literary social networks.

His work on computational methods grows out of a longstanding interest in the history of how technology impacts reading. His first book, Dreaming in Books: The Making of the Bibliographic Imagination in the Romantic Age (Chicago 2009), was awarded the Modern Language Association Prize for a First Book and honorable mention for the Harry Levin Prize from the American Comparative Literature Association. This was followed by Book Was There: Reading in Electronic Times (Chicago 2012), which chronicled the embodied dimensions of reading over the past two-thousand years.

His work has appeared in The Atlantic, The New Republic, Public Books, The Guardian, Slate, Le Devoir, and he has appeared in interviews on the CBC, NBC News, the Financial Times, and La Presse.