Authorial Filtering and Computational Models: A Dynamic Analysis of Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum through a Fluid-Dynamics-Inspired Framework

Authorial-filtering plays a crucial role in constructing literary meaning. It is the narrative act of selectively activating, suppressing, or leaving certain information latent within a story. Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum stands as a paradigmatic case of this phenomenon, as it exemplifies a narrative wherein presence and absence, action and potentiality, remain in constant flux through intra- and intertextual interplay. In this preliminary study, we propose a novel computational framework inspired by fluid dynamics to detect authorial-filtering information within literary texts. Applying this approach to Foucault’s Pendulum, our results reveal how narrative motifs and topics flow, diffuse, and react throughout the text, closely mirroring the qualitative interpretations of domain experts. Our proposed framework not only sheds new light on Eco’s complex narrative mechanisms but also advances computational narratology by providing an interpretable model for digital literary analysis. We make the implementation of our framework publicly available.