English Bards and Unknown Reviewers: a Stylometric Analysis of Thomas Moore and the Christabel Review

Fraught relations between authors and critics are a commonplace of literary history. The particular case that we discuss in this article, a negative review of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Christabel (1816), has an additional point of interest beyond the usual mixture of amusement and resentment that surrounds a critical rebuke: the authorship of the review remains, to this day, uncertain. The purpose of this article is to investigate the possible candidacy of Thomas Moore as the author of the provocative review. It seeks to solve a puzzle of almost two hundred years, and in the process clear a valuable scholarly path in Irish Studies, Romanticism, and in our understanding of Moore's role in a prominent literary controversy of the age

"The Literature-Linguistics Interface -- Bridging the Gap Between Qualitative and Quantitative Approaches to Literary Texts"

presentation of the conference \u201cBridging Gaps,Creating Links. The Qualitative-Quantitative Interface in the Study of Literature\u201d, which took place at the DiSLL (Department of Linguistic and Literary Studies), University of Padua, on June 7-9, 201

The stylometry of film dialogue : pros and pitfalls

We examine film dialogue with quantitative textual analysis (stylometry, sentiment analysis, distant reading). Working with transcribed dialogue in almost 300 productions, we explore the complex way in which most-frequent-words-based stylometry and lexicon-based sentiment analysis produce patterns of similarity and difference between screenwriters and/or a priori IMDB-defined genres. In fact, some of our results show that counting and comparing very frequent word lists reveals further similarities: of theme, implied audience, stylistic patternings. The results are encouraging enough to suggest that such quantitative approach to film dialogue may become a welcome addition to the arsenal of film studies methodology

A Question of Style: individual voices and corporate identity in the Edinburgh Review, 1814-1820

We present our project, A Question of Style: individual voices and corporate identity in the Edinburgh Review, 1814-1820, which is funded by a Research Society for Victorian Periodicals Field Development Grant running until October 2017. We want to assess the assumption that early nineteenth-century periodicals succeeded in creating, through a “transauthorial discourse”, a unified corporate voice that hid individual authors behind an impersonal public text (Klancher 1987). We are creating a sample corpus of approximately 500,000 words comprising 325,000 words from the Edinburgh Review and 175,000 from its competitor, the Quarterly Review, for a total of about 80 articles. To assist our OCR correction, metadata creation and textual markup, we are developing a suite of Python scripts, based on our previous work with post-OCR correction (King 2013) and semi-automated TEI markup (Willis et al 2010). We employ methods from periodical studies, book history, computational linguistics and computational stylistics to “operationalise” our definition of style in order to select features that can be measured empirically, transforming concepts into a set of operations (Moretti 2013). We will focus on features at the level of words and sentences such as: vocabulary richness, length of articles, length of sentences, length of quotations from text under review, distribution of parts of speech, distinctive vocabulary of each journal, distinctive vocabulary of each author, distinctive vocabulary in each type of review (literature, travel, politics etc.), using methods such as term frequency: inverse document frequency, Burrows’ Delta and Zeta methods, Moretti’s Most Distinctive Words Method, and Principal Component Analysis. Finally, we will qualitatively describe the results of this stylistic analysis and evaluate them within the context of both literary scholarship on nineteenth-century periodicals and computational linguistics scholarship, using our literary and historical interpretation to generate critical knowledge out of our measurements

Computing the Affective-Aesthetic Potential of Literary Texts

In this paper, we compute the affective-aesthetic potential (AAP) of literary texts by using a simple sentiment analysis tool called SentiArt. In contrast to other established tools, SentiArt is based on publicly available vector space models (VSMs) and requires no emotional dictionary, thus making it applicable in any language for which VSMs have been made available (>150 so far) and avoiding issues of low coverage. In a first study, the AAP values of all words of a widely used lexical databank for German were computed and the VSM’s ability in representing concrete and more abstract semantic concepts was demonstrated. In a second study, SentiArt was used to predict ~2800 human word valence ratings and shown to have a high predictive accuracy (R2 > 0.5, p < 0.0001). A third study tested the validity of SentiArt in predicting emotional states over (narrative) time using human liking ratings from reading a story. Again, the predictive accuracy was highly significant: R2adj = 0.46, p < 0.0001, establishing the SentiArt tool as a promising candidate for lexical sentiment analyses at both the micro- and macrolevels, i.e., short and long literary materials. Possibilities and limitations of lexical VSM-based sentiment analyses of diverse complex literary texts are discussed in the light of these results