• Bruno Nassi Universidad del Pacífico

Universidad del Pacífico

Mario Vargas Llosa (1936–2025) is the most important contemporary Peruvian writer. His work circulates worldwide, and its exceptional quality was recognized with the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2010. His literary production comprises 20 novels, 3 short story collections, 17 essay collections, and 2 memoirs, as well as a substantial number of journalistic articles. In his novels, space functions as a crucial element of the plot: without it, the unfolding of events would be impossible. This is the case, for instance, with the oppressive atmosphere of the Leoncio Prado Military Academy, which gives rise within its walls to the drama of the interns (cadets); similarly, the bar La Catedral serves as the setting for the conversation between Santiago Zavala and the Ambrosio (the former driver of his father), which constitutes the narrative thread of the novel. Thus, from the Amazonian city of Iquitos to Diego Ferré and Ocharán streets in the Lima district of Miraflores, the places depicted in these novels are not mere backdrops but generative spaces that enable and shape the events narrated.

 

In light of the above, the project “Critical Georeferencing of the First Five Novels of Mario Vargas Llosa Using Artificial Intelligence” seeks to critically georeference the Peruvian locations present in the first five novels of the author: La ciudad y los perros (1963), La casa verde (1966), Conversación en La Catedral (1969), Pantaleón y las visitadoras (1973), and La tía Julia y el escribidor (1977). With the support of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and other technological tools, the project aims to develop a digital platform hosting an interactive map of Peru on which the places mentioned in these texts by the Nobel Prize–winning author will be located. The process will begin by providing the AI with the novels in PDF format and training it to identify the locations referenced in the texts through Toponymic Named Entity Recognition (NER). This will be followed by disambiguation, geocoding, coordinate validation, and, finally, the generation of the interactive map using tools such as Folium or Leaflet.

 

It is important to note that each georeferenced location will be accompanied by an informational pop-up window activated by user interaction. This window will include one or more textual excerpts in which the relevant place is mentioned, as well as an explanation of the significance of the selected space—this constitutes the critical dimension of the georeferencing exercise. Whenever possible, historical photographs from the period in which the novels are set will be displayed alongside contemporary images of the same locations (for example, archival records of the Leoncio Prado Military Academy can be contrasted with current photographs).

 

The primary objective of the project is to consolidate a pedagogical tool within the framework of the Digital Humanities that offers readers of these five novels by Vargas Llosa a dynamic reading experience, fostering greater engagement and deeper comprehension.

 

The paper will present in detail the nature of the project, which is currently developing, its objectives, the motivations behind its implementation, its significance for the development of Digital Humanities in relation to Peruvian Literary Studies, and the methodological procedures to be employed. 

• Fred Truyen (Professor) KU Leuven,
• Sofie Taes KU Leuven,
• Zoë Vandenhende KU Leuven

KU Leuven

The IMPULSE Workshops at KU Leuven

How do you design an immersive learning and research environment that is both technically experimental and genuinely educational? This question lay at the core of a series of collaborative workshops organised at KU Leuven within the Horizon-funded IMPULSE project (Immersive digitization: uPcycling cULtural heritage towards new reviving StratEgies). The workshops were grounded in the IMPULSE co-creation methodology, which emphasises iterative prototyping, cross-disciplinary collaboration, and experience-led design, and is closely connected to the user experience (UX) research conducted throughout the project.

At KU Leuven, the workshops drew on scientific collections spanning manuscripts, prints, maps, drawings, glass slides, and scanned pages from the Vesalius manuscript - materials that pose real questions about how heritage of varying dimensionality and complexity can be brought into a shared 3D space. The workshops treated these questions as productive starting points rather than obstacles. What kinds of spatial presentation, interaction, and collaboration become possible when diverse collection materials are placed in an immersive environment?

The central question was whether providing students and researchers with access to such material in a shared, multi-user 3D environment offers real added value; and whether that access could be genuinely reciprocal. Rather than positioning students as passive recipients of institutional knowledge, the workshops were structured so that students could actively help unearth new storytelling and valorisation pathways for the collections. Can spatial presentation support new forms of comparison and interpretation? And does designing for an immersive environment push students to surface narratives and connections that enrich the collections themselves?

The student teams experimented with exhibition-like scenographies, treating documents and images as objects to be arranged, grouped, layered, and sequenced. Inspired by curatorial practices, they designed spatial constellations that encouraged users to move through collections and construct shared interpretations. In doing so, they generated storytelling approaches and valorisation strategies that fed back into how the collections themselves might be presented and communicated. UX design played a central role throughout: attention was paid to navigation, interaction, accessibility, and spatial clarity, with design decisions evaluated against user feedback in line with the broader UX research within IMPULSE.

This presentation will analyse the outcomes of the workshop series held between February 2025 and September 2026 at KU Leuven. It will discuss which spatial and narrative strategies participants adopted, how archival and technical constraints shaped their decisions, and how insights from UX testing informed the development of the environments. It will also situate these findings within the IMPULSE methodological framework and its journal of good practices.

The KU Leuven workshops provide a grounded case study within IMPULSE, demonstrating how collaborative 3D environments can serve not only as visualisation tools but as experimental spaces where learning runs in both directions - students gaining skills in immersive design while actively contributing to the storytelling and valorisation of the collections they work with.

• Abdulrahman A. A. Alsayed University of St Andrews // King Faisal University

University of St Andrews

A corpus-based cognitive investigation of information-structural construction in discourse syntax (Alsayed 2026) employs a triangulation pipeline that integrates virtual reality (VR) into both data collection and data analysis of speech samples. This triangulation combines complementary methodological approaches in cognitive linguistics (cf. Evans 2019, pp. 41–50), including corpus-based, audiovisual, experimental, and introspective methods. This paper examines how VR can be operationalized in the compilation and analysis of VR-mediated records of spoken discourse to create a new type of corpus, termed an "egocentric embodiment corpus." It focuses on three aspects of operationalization, detailing how VR mediation is used to: (i) implement an experimental staging paradigm that enhances behavioral control; (ii) integrate egocentric vision across multiple stages of a mixed-method triangulation pipeline; and (iii) support the interpretation of the cognitive processes and representations involved in linguistic construction.

First, with respect to the experimental staging paradigm, VR-mediated linguistic fieldwork (Alsayed 2023) that employs portable head-mounted VR displays shows strong potential as a tool for visual stimulus delivery and audiovisual data capture in field settings. The development of embodiment corpora through controlled stimuli helps mitigate the ephemerality of communicative events in dynamic spatiotemporal contexts. Second, VR functions as a core component across four stages of a corpus-based triangulation pipeline, codenamed MDEL, CEERR, TE5T and MARK-IS (cf. Alsayed 2026). Finally, VR mediation contributes to explanatory insights into cognition, particularly the phenomenon of common ground simulation, which is argued to lie at the core of information-structural optimization. It also supports empirical, linguistically-driven investigation of cognitive processes relevant to simulation, including memory, attention, and preattentive processing. Preattentive processing is further examined through the novel application of visual actuation sensory schemata (cf. Alsayed 2025) and their linkage to triggered speech outputs and audiovisual VR recordings. The paper concludes by discussing future prospects for this form of VR-mediated operationalization, with particular emphasis on the role of embodiment corpora in linguistics, cognitive science, and digital humanities research.

 

References

Alsayed, Abdulrahman A. A. 2023. “Extended Reality Language Research: Data Sources, Taxonomy and the Documentation of Embodied Corpora”. Modern Languages Open 2023 (1): 46. Liverpool University Press. https://doi.org/10.3828/mlo.v0i0.441

Alsayed, Abdulrahman A. A. 2025. “Analysing Egocentric Captures in VR-Mediated Embodiment Corpora: A Sensory Schematization Approach”. Proceedings of the Digital Humanities Congress 2024. The Digital Humanities Institute. https://www.dhi.ac.uk/books/dhc2024/alsaye

Alsayed, Abdulrahman A. A. 2026. The Universe of Discourse in a Virtual World: Triangulating Discourse Syntax with VR-Mediated Corpora, Sensory Schemata, and Cognitive Simulation. PhD thesis, University of St Andrews. https://doi.org/10.17630/sta/1500

Evans, Vyvyan. 2019. Cognitive Linguistics: A Complete Guide. 2nd ed. Edinburgh University Press. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781474405232