Computational Literary Studies
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...
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...
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...
In what seems like a distant past, that is in september 2012, Lars Schneider and me organized a two-day session at the bi-annual conference of the German French Scholars’ Association in Leipzig (Frankoromanistenkongress; website no longer available!). The other day, the proceedings finally came out and we are of course very happy and proud. Just because it is digital doesn’t...
For some reason I can’t explain, I have had for many years a very keen interest in crime fiction, especially French crime fiction written since the 1950s, roughly. Some of my favorite authors are Léo Malet, Jean-Patrick Manchette, Sébastien Japrisot and Didier Daeninckx. And it is not for no reason that I was drawn to Mitzi Morris’ stylometric murder mystery...
Last week, we had our little digital humanities conference here in Würzburg, called <philtag n=”11″/> because this was the eleventh annual edition of the event. It was a great event, with plenty of wonderful talks about digital editing of manuscripts, immersive virtual reality, 3D laser-scans of cuneiform writing, network analysis of drama, and a lot more. For me, it was...
(Please note that a revised version of this post has been published in the Journal for Digital Humanities in december 2013. – The original post is a slightly edited version of a talk I gave at the European Summer School “Culture & Technology at the University of Leipzig, Germany, on July 26 2013.) This talk is about data in the...
The Digital Humanities Conference 2013 in Lincoln, Nebraska will start very soon. The program is packed with long and short talks and panel sessions in six parallel tracks, and of course the whole breadth of DH is represented. But computational text analysis seems to be one of the major topics again, after it was so prominent last year at DH2012...
This post is a follow-up post to my last brief post on the new version of the stylo script and its output for visualization with Gephi. Today, I just want to report on what Maciej told me about the technical details, and to show some more graphs resulting from my data. First things first, then. Here is how the data for...
Do you like stylometry, and maybe have tried out the scripts for R provided by the Computational Stylistics Group? And do you like visualisation, and maybe have played around a bit with Gephi, the network visualisation tool? I suppose it’s rather likely that you have, as a reader of this blog, or at least that your interested in this kind...
Lot’s of things have been going on over these last weeks. Some of them were related to text analysis, others were rather related to job interviews, grant writing, teaching, real work, and travel, and I was just too busy to write anything here. Instead of a “real” post, this is just a way for me to cover the ground and...
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...
(Eine deutsche Fassung dieses Beitrags erscheint zeitgleich bei “Philologeek“.) Last week, at the Göttinger philologisches Forum, I had the occasion to report on the current state of my “stylometric experiments” involving above all the relationship between authorship and genre in French classical theater. (I know this sounds like its always the same topic, but I keep making small advances.) Without...
