{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.03143893591293833, 'fraction_numerical': 0.0, 'mean_word_length': 5.4186046511627906, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Introduction: Social Minds in Factual and Fictional Narration

Narratives detail the multifarious fortunes of individuals entangled in social scenarios. The emphasis in scholarly expeditions has overwhelmingly been on the first part of this equation, single protagonists. The end of the passage above, however, highlights the formation of a social mind: “ . . . together their individual selves gathered into something very close to a single presence.” Such collective experience, as represented in textual narrative, is the overarching object of study for this special issue. My co-editor, Eva von Contzen, and I start from the premise that the techniques for representing the agents of shared experience—social minds, meaning groups of various sizes, shapes, and modalities—constitute intra-narrative phenomena which, despite