Resonance Finder

In August 2025, I presented our Resonance Finder for the first time to a small group of gender studies scholars. I typed a description of a difficult experience – one of sexual violence, which for now is what the Resonance Finder focuses on  – into the chatbot, and the chatbot offered me emotional support, together with passages resonating with my experience from literature, testimonials, and historical archives – what I call "nuanced narratives." Later that day, I received an email from one of the scholars in the audience, who has gone through a traumatic legal process after being sued for defamation by a person she had #MeToo-ed. “I want to express my appreciation to your Resonance Finder,” she wrote. “There was a time when I was obsessed with finding books and online posts dealing with a similar experience, so that I know I’m not alone, and that I can learn how other people cope with this situation.” To which I replied, “Thank you for this encouragement. I resonate with you. We've all been there."

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Sexual violence is a majority experience for women, because more women than not have experienced it at some point in their lives. The same can be said of many other difficult experiences. In this digital age, those who live in the aftermath of difficult experiences may define themselves as having Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, chat with a therapist chatbot, and establish individualized medical and mental coping plans. Meanwhile, they can join a support group, online or in person. Resonance Finder takes this work one step further to connect people to broad communities, both real and fictional, that share similar experiences in vastly different ways.

As a Humanist, I believe that contextualizing a difficult, lonely experience in a crowd and that extending sympathy to others is as important, and as healing, as establishing an individualized coping plan for oneself. Contextualizing also helps build a community that can in turn benefit others. As a literary scholar, I believe that nuanced narratives inspire people to process their feelings and foster understanding of others on a level that social media and short news posts can seldom reach. In East Asia, literature has played a decisive role in igniting the recent wave of social movements against sexual violence. Theoretically, plenty of work has been done to explore the role of literature in narrating and witnessing trauma, a kind of experience that is hard to articulate because it falls outside one’s known framework of reference.

With the Resonance Finder, we hope to connect people struggling with difficult experiences not only to those who share similar experiences from the same time and space, but also to those from vastly different times and spaces, in the remote past and in faraway corners of the world, real and imagined. In this way, they can relativize their experience by transcending their temporal and spatial limits and practicing sympathy for the broadest community of human beings.

This research project is still in an early stage.