Computational Literary Studies
This post is a brief presentation of the Stylometry Bibliography we recently published on Zotero. What is the scope of this bibliography? The understanding of the term stylometry underlying the conceptual scope of the bibliography is relatively wide and covers any type of quantitative analysis of literary style. In practice, a large part of the entries are focused on stylometry...
This is a short technical post about an interesting feature of Mallet which I have recently discovered or rather, whose (for me) unexpected effect on the topic models I have discovered: the parameter that controls the hyperparameter optimization interval in Mallet.[1] Yes, there are parameters, there are hyperparameters, and there are parameters controlling how hyperparameters are optimized. For a long...
In a conversation about my recent post on sentence length in Georges Simenon’s work, Fotis Jannidis said he thought the post was typical of quite a lot of recent work in digital literary studies in that it is exploratory rather than focused on hypothesis testing. I think this is true and that it is a problem. Exploratory methods, especially when...
The aims of this post are to explain what collation is, why detecting transpositions is special, and how to accomplish it using CollateX. The example I will be using involves comparing two versions of the recent best-selling novel The Martian by Andy Weir, a novel whose publishing history Erik Ketzan and me are currently investigating. More specifically, I will illustrate...
Belgian author Georges Simenon is probably most famous for his crime fiction novels in which police detective Maigret investigates serious crimes and elucidates them with intelligence, empathy, a team of inspectors and acquaintances, and, of course, his tobacco pipe as well as sandwiches and beers brought to his office. Simenon wrote 75 of these Maigret novels (and a certain number...
It is high time to talk about Poetic Justice by Mitzi Morris, the recent stylometric mystery novel I have been promising to write about in my post on Amanda Crosses Poetic Justice, also in the series on Computers and Literature in Fiction. (Sorry for not linking to the place where you can buy the book, but it’s already bad enough...
For a while now, I have been wondering how working with digital data, tools and methods changes the way we work in the humanities. Qualitative tagging of literary phenomena leads to a formalization of them and to the ability to model complex phenomena, for example. And quantitative text analysis can give us a much more distant and broader view of...
Wouldn’t it be nice if teaching and research could always be closely connected? And I don’t just mean students benefitting from their instructors being active researchers. I also mean it the other way around, with researchers benefitting from the work they are doing with the students. The true Einheit von Forschung und Lehre (i.e., the unity of research and teaching)...
The dendrogram is a classic and beloved visualization in stylometry. One could even say that, ever since it was included in the inevitable and unmatched stylo package for R, it has become an icon and metonymy of stylometry itself. The example shown below (Figure 1) illustrates what such a dendrogram looks like, although given its ubiquity, there is almost no...
Introduction Genre is, like authorship or time period, one of a number of fundamental categories allowing authors and readers as well as literary scholars to endow the vast field of literary production with some internal structure. Genre is not specific to literature, of course: whether we consider painting, music or cinema, genre as an intermediary category situated between individual works...
Introduction The topic of this post is the evolution of average sentence length in literary texts and can be understood as a sequel, after a long time, to a post about sentence length in French literature, only this time the focus is on English-language fiction (with some forays into multiple European languages) and on a somewhat different time-frame (with a...
Virtually anyone working with XML files in the context of the Digital Humanities, and especially in the context of scholarly digital editing, knows the oXygen XML editor. It is mature and packed with useful features, and yet every new version brings even more features and improvements. In fact, it is an editing ecosystem rather than an editor. It entertains a...
This post is a brief presentation of the Stylometry Bibliography we recently published on Zotero. What is the scope of this bibliography? The understanding of the term stylometry underlying the conceptual scope of the bibliography is relatively wide and covers any type of quantitative analysis of literary style. In practice, a large part of the entries are focused on stylometry...
This is a short technical post about an interesting feature of Mallet which I have recently discovered or rather, whose (for me) unexpected effect on the topic models I have discovered: the parameter that controls the hyperparameter optimization interval in Mallet.[1] Yes, there are parameters, there are hyperparameters, and there are parameters controlling how hyperparameters are optimized. For a long...
In a conversation about my recent post on sentence length in Georges Simenon’s work, Fotis Jannidis said he thought the post was typical of quite a lot of recent work in digital literary studies in that it is exploratory rather than focused on hypothesis testing. I think this is true and that it is a problem. Exploratory methods, especially when...
The aims of this post are to explain what collation is, why detecting transpositions is special, and how to accomplish it using CollateX. The example I will be using involves comparing two versions of the recent best-selling novel The Martian by Andy Weir, a novel whose publishing history Erik Ketzan and me are currently investigating. More specifically, I will illustrate...
Belgian author Georges Simenon is probably most famous for his crime fiction novels in which police detective Maigret investigates serious crimes and elucidates them with intelligence, empathy, a team of inspectors and acquaintances, and, of course, his tobacco pipe as well as sandwiches and beers brought to his office. Simenon wrote 75 of these Maigret novels (and a certain number...
by Ulrike Henny and Christof Schöch — this post originally appeared on the CLiGS blog. Some weeks ago, we made our “New Year’s release” of text collections available. We publish the texts in the “CLiGS” group’s GitHub repository called “textbox“ and archive each release on Zenodo where they get a DOI. The texts are encoded in TEI with relatively detailed...
Note: The following post first appeared on the Europeana Research Blog on November 30, 2015, in their “Text Mining” series which also includes posts by Ted Underwood and Gregor Wiedemann. Over the last several years, there has been an increasing interest in large-scale, computational, quantitative investigations into European literary history. Scholars working on texts from many different European literary traditions...
For the last year or so, one my major interests has been topic modeling and applying it to a variety of French literary texts. I have been doing this as part of an exploration of the computational analysis of literary genres in our Würzburg junior researchers group. One of the interesting things to come out of all of this has...
When I enthusiastically present literary scholars with the surprising accuracy stylometric methods display in many cases of authorship attribution (given appropriate conditions, such as sufficient material, a certain homogeneity in the genre of the texts, and state-of-the art distance measures), some come up with a clever question: What if one author parodies the style of another author? Will stylometric methods...
This is a guest post, written by Philip Dürholt, a student in the “Digital Humanities” program (BA and MA) at the Department for Literary Computing, University of Würzburg. As always, comments are welcome! I’m a student at the University of Würzburg. My subjects are Philosophy and Digital Humanities. Last winter semester I had an interesting mix of courses: Quantitative Analysis...
