Category: Articles
What the perfect repository for text analysis looks like (to me)
The longer I work with various collections of literary texts, available in various formats, and for use with various tools, the more I would like to have a nice repository which me and others could use to ingest, store, transform, update and extract text collections. So what would this repository look like? Basically, I’m describing a use case, and would...
Enhancement, Transformation, and Zukunftsmusik: Established methods of interpretation transposed into the computational realm.
One of my favorite literary genres is French twentieth-century crime fiction, roughly from the 1930s (Georges Simenon) via the 1950s (Léo Malet) to the 1970s (Jean-Patrick Manchette). This is quite a large area, so one of the things I would like to do, if the state of text digitization and copyright law will permit it some day, is to do...
Mining Queneau and the Encyclopédie (or: back from the break)
When I went on a short holiday in August, I did not expect it would be the beginning of such a long break in my blogging activities here. Well, I have been busy! And busy mostly with things that are related less to text analysis and rather to text encoding. (Of course, a blog post in itself would be in...
Beyond the black box, or: understanding the difference between various statistical distance measures
One of the issues we noticed time and again when using the different stylometric approches is the huge influence of settings and parameters on the results. This is not surprising, of course, and also does not question the validity of the method as such. Rather, this is the result of the current historical state of stylometry, where research on the...
Stylometry in manuscript studies!?
When I signed up for the workshop on “Digital Manuscript Analysis” (organized by the University of Hamburg’s Centre for the Study of Manuscript Cultures at DH2012), I expected this to be something relatively disconnected from text analysis in literary studies. Author attribution studies as they are being widely practised today are very much focused on transcribed text, which allows to...
The convergence of the digital and the literary in research: an example
Over the last couple of days, I went to three conferences: two were very clearly on the humanities side of my interests, the first taking place in Berlin and concerning the relations between texts and images, the second one taking place in Mainz, and concerning Rousseau and his literary and intellectual consequences. The third conference was approaching the humanities from...