Reading Poetry and Prose: Eye Movements and Acoustic Evidence

We examined genre-specific reading strategies for literary texts and hypothesized that text categorization (literary prose vs. poetry) modulates both how readers gather information from a text (eye movements) and how they realize its phonetic surface form (speech production). We recorded eye movements and speech while college students (N = 32) orally read identical texts that we categorized and formatted as either literary prose or poetry. We further varied the text position of critical regions (text-initial vs. text-medial) to compare how identical information is read and articulated with and without context; this allowed us to assess whether genre-specific reading strategies make differential use of identical context information. We observed genre-dependent differences in reading and speaking tempo that reflected several aspects of reading and articulation. Analyses of regions of interests revealed that word-skipping increased particularly while readers progressed through the texts in the prose condition; speech rhythm was more pronounced in the poetry condition irrespective of the text position. Our results characterize strategic poetry and prose reading, indicate that adjustments of reading behavior partly reflect differences in phonetic surface form, and shed light onto the dynamics of genre-specific literary reading. They generally support a theory of literary comprehension that assumes distinct literary processing modes and incorporates text categorization as an initial processing step

Affordances and limitations of algorithmic criticism

Humanities scholars currently have access to unprecedented quantities of machine-readable texts, and, at the same time, the tools and the methods with which we can analyse and visualise these texts are becoming more and more sophisticated. As has been shown in numerous studies, many of the new technical possibilities that emerge from fields such as text mining and natural language processing can have useful applications within literary research. Computational methods can help literary scholars to discover interesting trends and correlations within massive text collections, and they can enable a thoroughly systematic examination of the stylistic properties of literary works. While such computer-assisted forms of reading have proven invaluable for research in the field of literary history, relatively few studies have applied these technologies to expand or to transform the ways in which we can interpret literary texts. Based on a comparative analysis of digital scholarship and traditional scholarship, this thesis critically examines the possibilities and the limitations of a computer-based literary criticism. It argues that quantitative analyses of data about literary techniques can often reveal surprising qualities of works of literature, which can, in turn, lead to new interpretative readings

Tagging time in prolog : the temporality effect project

This article combines a brief introduction into a particular philosophical theory of "time" with a demonstration of how this theory has been implemented in a Literary Studies oriented Humanities Computing project. The aim of the project was to create a model of text-based time cognition and design customized markup and text analysis tools that help to understand ‘‘how time works’’: more precisely, how narratively organised and communicated information motivates readers to generate the mental image of a chronologically organized world. The approach presented is based on the unitary model of time originally proposed by McTaggart, who distinguished between two perspectives onto time, the so-called A- and B-series. The first step towards a functional Humanities Computing implementation of this theoretical approach was the development of TempusMarker—a software tool providing automatic and semi-automatic markup routines for the tagging of temporal expressions in natural language texts. In the second step we discuss the principals underlying TempusParser—an analytical tool that can reconstruct temporal order in events by way of an algorithm-driven process of analysis and recombination of textual segments during which the "time stamp" of each segment as indicated by the temporal tags is interpreted

The LitOLAP Project: Data Warehousing with Literature

The litOLAP project seeks to apply the Business Intelligence techniques of Data Warehousing and OLAP to the domain of text processing (specifically, computer-aided literary studies). A literary data warehouse is similar to a conventional corpus, but its data is stored and organized in multidimensional cubes, in order to promote efficient end-user queries. An initial implementation exists for litOLAP, and emphasis has been placed on cube-storage methods and caching intermediate results for reuse. Work continues on improving the query engine, the ETL process, and the user interfaces

Method for merging subtitles

A method of electronically processing a broadcast subtitle signal so as to merge lines of subtitles and correct possible transmission errors allows subtitles to be rendered and/or stored in a form suitable for further text processing and, in particular, keyword searches. Applications of the method or computer program or system implementing the method include the creation, maintenance, indexing or searching of a multimedia library or database, in particular when the literary comprises broadcast television programmes and the corresponding subtitles

Global coherence, narrative structure, and expectations of relevance

A topic for both literary studies and discourse analysis is the global structure of texts. Studies of global text structure have largely been focused on narrative structure, where a major strand of research has been devoted to the role which grounding (sometimes called information staging or foreground-background articulation) has for discourse structuring. It is often claimed that grounding is an important aspect of the notion of global coherence, that the overt realisation of grounding effects in texts depend on their genre and that this is generally reflected in the verbal system of natural languages (e.g. Caenepeel 1995; Hooper 1998; Hopper 1979; Fleischmann 1985; 1990; Longacre 1983; 1989). However, the notions of foreground and background are notoriously vague. In this paper I will argue for an alternative account of grounding effects based on the relevance-theoretic claim that the fine-tuning of the addressee's expectations of relevance is an essential part of the on-line processing of complex ostensive stimuli such as texts (Unger 2001). Linguistic and non-linguistic clues can be used to point the addressee to gradations in information grounding within a text in ways which far extend the coding resources of natural languages. This account may provide an explanatory account for Gumperz' (1992) "contextualization clues" and thus open up a new line of interdisciplinary interaction of relevance-theoretic pragmatics with some strands of research in ethnomethodology. It also suggests the idea that the emergence of literary form may be facilitated by the relevance-orientedness of cognition and communication which suggests that the more clues the communicator can give for fine-tuning the addressee's expectation of relevance in complex stimuli, the better chance of successful communication he has, which in turn motivates the use of communicative clues far beyond the coding resources of given natural languages as well as adherence to cultural conventions regarding the form of texts

The Treatment of Geographical Dialect in Literary Translation from the Perspective of Relevance Theory

This paper discusses problems involved in the translation of literary works that apply linguistic varieties, especially geographical dialects. It surveys selected approaches to the functions of dialects in literature and to the strategies of dealing with linguistic variation in translation, arguing that the understanding of the issue may be deepened and systematized by applying notions drawn from relevance theory. The use of dialect in literary texts is interpreted as a communicative clue and the translators′ approach to its rendering is described with reference to the cognitive environment of the recipients and the balance of processing effort and communicative gain. Examples are drawn from the Polish translations of The Secret Garden by F.H. Burnett, the oldest coming from 1917 and the newest from 2012, which highlight the translators′ changing assumptions on the recipients′ cognitive environment reflected in the choice of the strategy of dialect rendition

An Evaluation of Text Classification Methods for Literary Study

This article presents an empirical evaluation of text classification methods in literary domain. This study compared the performance of two popular algorithms, naı¨ve Bayes and support vector machines (SVMs) in two literary text classification tasks: the eroticism classification of Dickinson’s poems and the sentimentalism classification of chapters in early American novels. The algorithms were also combined with three text pre-processing tools, namely stemming, stopword removal, and statistical feature selection, to study the impact of these tools on the classifiers’ performance in the literary setting. Existing studies outside the literary domain indicated that SVMs are generally better than naı¨ve Bayes classifiers. However, in this study SVMs were not all winners. Both algorithms achieved high accuracy in sentimental chapter classification, but the naı¨ve Bayes classifier outperformed the SVM classifier in erotic poem classification. Self-feature selection helped both algorithms improve their performance in both tasks. However, the two algorithms selected relevant features in different frequency ranges, and therefore captured different characteristics of the target classes. The evaluation results in this study also suggest that arbitrary featurereduction steps such as stemming and stopword removal should be taken very carefully. Some stopwords were highly discriminative features for Dickinson’s erotic poem classification. In sentimental chapter classification, stemming undermined subsequent feature selection by aggressively conflating and neutralizing discriminative features

Spectators’ aesthetic experiences of sound and movement in dance performance

In this paper we present a study of spectators’ aesthetic experiences of sound and movement in live dance performance. A multidisciplinary team comprising a choreographer, neuroscientists and qualitative researchers investigated the effects of different sound scores on dance spectators. What would be the impact of auditory stimulation on kinesthetic experience and/or aesthetic appreciation of the dance? What would be the effect of removing music altogether, so that spectators watched dance while hearing only the performers’ breathing and footfalls? We investigated audience experience through qualitative research, using post-performance focus groups, while a separately conducted functional brain imaging (fMRI) study measured the synchrony in brain activity across spectators when they watched dance with sound or breathing only. When audiences watched dance accompanied by music the fMRI data revealed evidence of greater intersubject synchronisation in a brain region consistent with complex auditory processing. The audience research found that some spectators derived pleasure from finding convergences between two complex stimuli (dance and music). The removal of music and the resulting audibility of the performers’ breathing had a significant impact on spectators’ aesthetic experience. The fMRI analysis showed increased synchronisation among observers, suggesting greater influence of the body when interpreting the dance stimuli. The audience research found evidence of similar corporeally focused experience. The paper discusses possible connections between the findings of our different approaches, and considers the implications of this study for interdisciplinary research collaborations between arts and sciences