Evaluation of Measures of Distinctiveness. Classification of Literary Texts on the Basis of Distinctive Words

This paper concerns an empirical evaluation of nine different measures of distinctiveness or ‘keyness’ in the context of Computational Literary Studies. We use nine different sets of literary texts (specifically, novels) written in seven different languages as a basis for this evaluation. The evaluation is performed as a downstream classification task, where segments of the novels need to be classified by subgenre or period of first publication. The classifier receives different numbers of features identified using different measures of distinctiveness. The main contribution of our paper is that we can show that across a wide variety of parameters, but especially when only a small number of features is used, (more recent) dispersion-based measures very often outperform other (more established) frequency-based measures by significant margins. Our findings support an emerging trend to consider dispersion as an important property of words in addition to frequency

On Editing

Covering the changes in Shakespeare editorial theory and practice over the decades between the publication of the Oxford Shakespeare (1986) and the New Oxford Shakespeare (2016), this article surveys a range of modern texts with different rationales and aimed at different readerships. The article has three sections: the imagery associated with editorial activity, issues of authorship and collaboration, and the place of performance in editions. We trace the conceptual changes between the Textual Companion that accompanied the 1986 edition, and the Authorship Companion that is the equivalent for the 2016 edition, discussing the role of quantitative and qualitative approaches to questions of authorship and collaboration. We pay particular attention to the metaphors and tropes that shape editorial discourse, finding their echoes in early modern paratextual material. Pervasive anthropomorphic textual imagery tends implicitly to feminize texts (and masculinize editors), and we discuss the changing demands on editors and the continued dominance of male editors, particularly for Shakespeare’s tragedies and histories. A final section discusses Arden editorial generations of Hamlet alongside the play’s own telos of interrupted succession and its preoccupation with ghosts and the past

Corpus Stylistics and Henry James’s Syntax

The starting point of this dissertation is a methodological question: how can corpus stylistics be used to analyse the syntax of literary fiction? A comparison of the syntax of Henry James’s late style in The Golden Bowl (1904) and his early style in Washington Square (1881) was used as a case study. While James’s late style is very widely discussed by literary critics and often seen as ‘difficult’, there has been very little evidence offered to substantiate this description. Within the extensive field of Henry James studies, there have been few linguistic descriptions of James’s prose. To remedy this, I compiled The Henry James Parsed Corpus (HJPC) from five chapters from each of the two novels. My analysis of the corpus showed that The Golden Bowl is more syntactically complex than Washington Square in a number of ways but only in sentences which do not contain direct speech. James’s idiosyncratic use of parenthesis was defined precisely using syntactic criteria and named delay. The Golden Bowl has more delay than Washington Square but also only in non-speech sentences. Only a small number of sentences have very high numbers of dependent clauses and/or delay. I argue that these exceptional sentences create the impression that the later text is homogeneously difficult. My research shows that this impression is deceptive; in fact the overwhelming majority of sentences in The Golden Bowl are no more syntactically complex than those of Washington Square. A secondary use of the HJPC is to assist close reading. Chapter outlines of the central chapter of each novel were generated and were found to mirror plot developments and dialogue sections. Salient sentences highlighted many key moments in the plot, or revealed aspects of characters’ personalities

2008 IMSAloquium, Student Investigation Showcase

Marking its twentieth year, IMSA’s Student Inquiry and Research Program (SIR) is a powerful expression of the Academy’s mission, “to ignite and nurture creative ethical minds that advance the human condition.”https://digitalcommons.imsa.edu/archives_sir/1000/thumbnail.jp

EN CARNE PROPIA: EMBODIED IDENTITIES IN CUBAN AND MEXICAN CULTURAL PRODUCTION

In twentieth-century Cuba and Mexico, each post-revolutionary state consolidated power through cultural production, especially film and literature, by funding national cinema and institutions such as the Union of Cuban Writers and Artists. This project examines the ways in which contemporary writers, filmmakers, and performance artists (1980-2006) emphasize personal, embodied experience to examine and frequently contest the generalized and overarching identity constructs propagated as part of an explicitly national post-revolutionary culture in Cuba and Mexico. Writers such as Ena Lucía Portela, Abilio Estévez, Pedro Juan Gutiérrez, Antonio José Ponte, Jorge Volpi, Federico Campbell, performance artist Astrid Hadad, and filmmakers Tommy Lee Jones, Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, and Alfonso Cuarón explore how the destabilization of revolutionary ideology and increasing economic and political changes in each country affects the daily lives of artistic subjects, thereby underscoring the social role of art and the tensions between art and commerce in contemporary Cuba and Mexico

Rational Creatures: Using Vector Space Models to Examine Independence in the Novels of Jane Austen, Maria Edgeworth, and Sydney Owenson (1800–1820)

Recent trends in digital humanities have led to a proliferation of studies that apply ‘distant’ reading to textual data. There is an uneasy relationship between the increased use of computational methods and their application to literary studies. Much of the current literature has focused on the exploration of large corpora. However, the ability to work at this scale is often not within the power (financial or technical) or the interests, of researchers. As these large-scale studies often ignore smaller corpora, few have sought to define a clear theoretical framework within which to study small-scale text collections. In addition, while some research has been carried out on the application of term-document vector space models (topic models and frequency based analysis) to nineteenth century novels, no study exists which applies word-context models (word embeddings and semantic networks) to the novels of Austen, Edgeworth, and Owenson. This study, therefore, seeks to evaluate the use of vector space models when applied to these novels. This research first defines a theoretical framework - enhanced reading - which combines the use of close and distant reading. Using a corpus of twenty-eight nineteenth century novels as its central focus, this study also demonstrates the practical application of this theoretical approach with the additional aim of providing an insight into the authors’ representation of independence at a time of great political and social upheaval in Ireland and the UK. The use of term-document models was found to be, generally, more useful for gaining an overview of the corpora. However, the findings for word-context models reveal their ability to identify specific textual elements, some of which were not readily identified through close reading, and therefore were useful for exploring texts at both corpus and individual text level

Rational Creatures: Using Vector Space Models to Examine Independence in the Novels of Jane Austen, Maria Edgeworth, and Sydney Owenson (1800–1820)

Recent trends in digital humanities have led to a proliferation of studies that apply ‘distant’ reading to textual data. There is an uneasy relationship between the increased use of computational methods and their application to literary studies. Much of the current literature has focused on the exploration of large corpora. However, the ability to work at this scale is often not within the power (financial or technical) or the interests, of researchers. As these large-scale studies often ignore smaller corpora, few have sought to define a clear theoretical framework within which to study small-scale text collections. In addition, while some research has been carried out on the application of term-document vector space models (topic models and frequency based analysis) to nineteenth century novels, no study exists which applies word-context models (word embeddings and semantic networks) to the novels of Austen, Edgeworth, and Owenson. This study, therefore, seeks to evaluate the use of vector space models when applied to these novels. This research first defines a theoretical framework - enhanced reading - which combines the use of close and distant reading. Using a corpus of twenty-eight nineteenth century novels as its central focus, this study also demonstrates the practical application of this theoretical approach with the additional aim of providing an insight into the authors’ representation of independence at a time of great political and social upheaval in Ireland and the UK. The use of term-document models was found to be, generally, more useful for gaining an overview of the corpora. However, the findings for word-context models reveal their ability to identify specific textual elements, some of which were not readily identified through close reading, and therefore were useful for exploring texts at both corpus and individual text level

'Schizomorphic visions': visuality and dissenting subjectivities in the poetry of the Italian neoavanguardia

This dissertation examines the role of literary visuality in the construction of cultural categories of madness, delirium, schizophrenia, and trauma in the poetry of the Italian neoavanguardia. In addition to exploring configurations of madness and delirium in theoretical and critical writings produced by members of various interrelated literary movements in the 1960s, this dissertation centres on close readings of a selection of lesser known ekphrastic, visual, concrete, and collage poetic works, produced between 1961-1977, by Giulia Niccolai, Edoardo Sanguineti, Adriano Spatola, and Patrizia Vicinelli. I look also to more recent thought outside of the immediate historical Italian-language context in order to illuminate and inform my readings of the strategies of these literary figures. As part of my analysis of the renegotiation of these fraught themes in the experimental poetry of the neoavanguardia, I investigate how the theoretical category of schizomorfismo as described by Alfredo Giuliani, a key figure in the literary group known as the Novissimi, provides an illuminating paradigm for reading the discontinuous, discordant and febrile literary forms found within this poetry. I draw attention to the underexamined visual dynamics at play in both theoretical and poetic writings of this period, expanding on the fluid relations between visuality and madness, and their invocation as dissenting, countercultural literary entities. As examples of a scrittura altra, invocations of ‘other’ subjectivities are, I argue, embedded in these mostly non-representational texts, which draw on the rich capacities of visual, typographic and concrete experimental forms to raise questions of normativity, marginalisation, and subjugation, as well as interrogate epistemologies of logic and logocentrism. Accordingly, this dissertation interrogates what it means to invoke cultural-clinical categories in the context of poetic experimentation and as literary tools of social critique at a historical moment, in Italy and beyond, when the relationship between clinical and cultural understandings of non-normative mental states were being fundamentally renegotiated

What’s the Big Fat Deal?: The Experience of Fat Students in College

Weight-based discrimination is considered the last acceptable form of discrimination in the United States. Fat bias and stigma are present in healthcare, employment, and education. This dissertation study explores the experiences of fat students on college campuses, examining their experiences of anti-fat bias and discrimination. Additionally, this study explores policy and practice implications for improving the experiences of fat college students and supporting body diversity on campus. This dissertation has four overarching research questions that focus on the following topics: fat students’ experiences of weight-based stigma and discrimination in college, the limitations of physical space on college campuses, perceptions of available resources for fat students, and the impact of demographic factors on the fat student experience in college. Eighteen survey participants and six interview participants provided data. Participants stated that their experiences of stigma and discrimination did not impact their overall college experience, which they reported as positive. Study participants expressed the need for a greater understanding of the needs of fat students and the need for increased opportunities to feel like they belong. This study shows that higher education institutions are not doing enough to support fat students and suggests changes for increased inclusion and retention

A Corpus Stylistic Investigation of the Language Style of Shakespeare's Plays in the Context of Other Contemporaneous Plays.

Shakespeare's plays occupy a uniquely prominent position in English language and literature. Shakespeare was, however, one among a number of other successful and popular playwrights of the late 16th and early 17th centuries, and, when examined on an empirical basis, his language style has much in common with that of his peers. In this corpus stylistic study, I investigate similarities and differences between the language in Shakespeare's plays and in a range of plays by a selection of other contemporaneous dramatists. My quantitative data is extracted from an existing corpus containing Shakespeare's First Folio, and a new, specialised parallel corpus of plays from similar dates and genres written by other contemporaneous dramatists. This new corpus was constructed during the study. The corpus linguistic methods I use are simple frequency, keyness (Scott e.g. 1999, 2000) and Baker's (2011) new concept of "lockwords". Simple frequency and keyness (linguistic items occurring with comparatively low or high statistical frequency) are established corpus linguistic methods for investigating language styles in literary texts. However, as Baker (2004:349) argues, keywords highlight only the differences between texts. Similarities are also important, to contextualise differences and avoid overstating their stylistic implications. Moreover, as I show in this study, empirical evidence of similarities is of stylistic interest. It reveals preferences for language style features which Shakespeare and other contemporaneous dramatists shared, and which constitute features of the register of Early Modern English drama. I examine three types of language units in each corpus: single words, word clusters and semantic domains. I extract word and word cluster data using Scott's (1999) WordSmith Tools and semantic domain data using Rayson's (2009) Wmatrix software tools. My findings have implications for (a) the distinctiveness of Shakespeare's style, (b) the register of EModE drama and (c) methods for investigating language similarities using corpus linguistic methodology