Drawing Elena Ferrante's Profile. Workshop Proceedings, Padova, 7 September 2017

Elena Ferrante is an internationally acclaimed Italian novelist whose real identity has been kept secret by E/O publishing house for more than 25 years. Owing to her popularity, major Italian and foreign newspapers have long tried to discover her real identity. However, only a few attempts have been made to foster a scientific debate on her work. In 2016, Arjuna Tuzzi and Michele Cortelazzo led an Italian research team that conducted a preliminary study and collected a well-founded, large corpus of Italian novels comprising 150 works published in the last 30 years by 40 different authors. Moreover, they shared their data with a select group of international experts on authorship attribution, profiling, and analysis of textual data: Maciej Eder and Jan Rybicki (Poland), Patrick Juola (United States), Vittorio Loreto and his research team, Margherita Lalli and Francesca Tria (Italy), George Mikros (Greece), Pierre Ratinaud (France), and Jacques Savoy (Switzerland). The chapters of this volume report the results of this endeavour that were first presented during the international workshop Drawing Elena Ferrante's Profile in Padua on 7 September 2017 as part of the 3rd IQLA-GIAT Summer School in Quantitative Analysis of Textual Data. The fascinating research findings suggest that Elena Ferrante\u2019s work definitely deserves \u201cmany hands\u201d as well as an extensive effort to understand her distinct writing style and the reasons for her worldwide success

Statistical Analysis of Textual Data from Corpora of Written Communication – New Results from an Italian Interdisciplinary Research Program (EASIEST)

The Project "EASIEST: Espressione Autistica. Studio Interdisciplinare con Elaborazione Statistico-Testuale" [EASIEST: Autistic Expression. An Interdisciplinar Study based on Statistical and Textual Analysis] is an Italian interdisciplinary research program involving linguistics, neuropsychiatry, psychology, sociology and statistics (especially text mining, content analysis and computer-aided analysis of textual data) aimed at studying the linguistic features of texts written by individuals with autism (in this case 38 persons who use facilitated communication) and facilitators (without disabilities). In the frame of this Project, the research group collected large corpora of texts written during session of facilitated communication (FC) in four accredited FC centers in Italy . The results support the existence of lexis and distributional patterns of grammatical categories that are characteristic of the written production of individuals with autism and that are different from those of facilitators. The lemmas used by individuals with autism were quantitatively and qualitatively different from those used by facilitators. The lexis of individuals with autism overlapped only partially with that of facilitators. Measures of lexical richness showed a greater number of different words and higher lexical richness in the group including individuals with autism as compared to the group of facilitators. From a qualitative viewpoint, lexical richness also resulted from both the use of words not attributable to the common lexis of Italian in both ordinary and unusual contexts and the emergence of a certain amount of original hapaxes (words with frequency equal to one). High register words, that do not belong to the Italian basic vocabulary, were also used by children under 10 years of age. Stylized language also emerges from creative expressions and the creation of neologisms, coined according to the word-formation rules of the Italian language. The distinctive linguistic features identified by the statistical analysis of lexical data and analyzed in depth by means of traditional qualitative methods derive from the greater complexity of texts written by individuals with autism in terms of both lexis and morpho-syntactic structures. In texts written by individuals with autism, grammatical categories (nouns, adjectives, verbs, adverbs etc.) show a specific distribution and particular syntactic structures tend to emerge. For example, individuals with autism tend to resort more frequently to modifiers as compared to facilitators: adverbs and adjectives. Moreover, they tend to omit grammatical words (prepositions, conjunctions, articles, pronouns) when this does not hamper the understanding of the sentence meaning. The texts written by individuals with autism were similar to each other and differed from the texts produced by their facilitators which, in their turn, resembled each other. The findings of this first research project supported the hypothesis that texts written by individuals with autism were characterized by distinctive and consistent lexical features. Compared with other studies highlighting lexical poverty and morpho-sintactical impairment, the results of the EASIEST project point to unexpected communicative skills in individuals with autism. Moreover, the conjoint linguistic and statistical methods adopted in this study appeared effective in highlighting differences among the groups and would be suitable for an interdisciplinary approach to the study of language in autism

Sulle tracce di Elena Ferrante: questioni di metodo e primi risultati

This chapter illustrates the implementation of quantitative analysis methods on a corpus of modern Italian novels aimed to shed light on the identity of Elena Ferrante, the pen name of a very successful novelist whose real identity is still unknown. After a review of previous attempts conducted according to different approaches (based on lexical, contextual and thematic factors), in order to offset the impact of diatopic varieties of Italian the seven novels written by Elena Ferrante have been compared to 39 novels written by ten authors from Campania (Ferrante\u2019s region of origin) according to two methods: correspondence analysis and intertextual distance. Both methods show that Elena Ferrante\u2019s novels are more similar to Domenico Starnone\u2019s works than to the novels of any other author included in the corpus. In addition, a lexical analysis shows that, compared to the other authors, Ferrante and Starnone share the greatest number of lexical items used exclusively in their novels. Conclusively, the qualitative and quantitative approaches used in this study confirm that a similarity emerges between the novels published by Ferrante and Starnone after the early 1990s and paves the way to further research based on larger corpora of fiction as well as non-fictional texts

Diversit\ue0\ua0statistiche. Un'analisi comparata

Attraverso metodi di analisi statistica dei dati testuali sono stati analizzati due corpora della ricerca Easiest mettendo a confronto produzioni scritte da autori autistici con quelle di non-autistici. Lo scopo \ue8 tentare di riconoscere attraverso valutazioni quantitative alcune peculiarit\ue0 del linguaggio autistico e di capire se, e in che misura, queste caratteristiche lo rendono diverso da quello dei gruppi di confronto. Da questo lavoro preliminare emergono sia elementi di atipicit\ue0 della produzione scritta dei soggetti autistici che specificit\ue0 rispetto a quella dei facilitatori/controlli, come gi\ue0 evidenziato in altri studi (Tuzzi et al., 2004). I dati analizzati sono tutti a sostegno di una profonda diversit\ue0 tra il linguaggio usato dagli autistici e quello usato da facilitatori/confronti e, di conseguenza, sono anche a sostegno dell\u2019autenticit\ue0 (e titolarit\ue0) dei messaggi trasmessi attraverso la CF

Reinhard K\uf6hler's scientific production: words, numbers and pictures

This study draws upon statistical analysis techniques of textual data to examine a corpus composed of 22 research articles published between 1997 and 2010 by Reinhard K\uf6hler as a single author or in collaboration with other scholars. The aim of this article is to draw a representation of the main areas of interest of his research. After having drawn an overall representation of the corpus, K\uf6hler\u2019s latest work \u2013 an unpublished volume on Quantitative Syntax Analysis \u2013 was analysed to understand its role within the context of his research

Le cinque macroregioni politicamente omogenee: analisi del comportamento elettorale 1992-96

L'analisi riguarda il comportamento elettorale dei collegi italiani nelle elezioni politiche degli anni 1992, 1994 e 1996. A partire dai risultati ottenuti dai vari partiti nelle tre consultazioni vengono evidenziate graficamente 5 macroregioni politicamente omogenee