Vector space explorations of literary language

Literary novels are said to distinguish themselves from other novels through conventions associated with literariness. We investigate the task of predicting the literariness of novels as perceived by readers, based on a large reader survey of contemporary Dutch novels. Previous research showed that ratings of literariness are predictable from texts to a substantial extent using machine learning, suggesting that it may be possible to explain the consensus among readers on which novels are literary as a consensus on the kind of writing style that characterizes literature. Although we have not yet collected human judgments to establish the influence of writing style directly (we use a survey with judgments based on the titles of novels), we can try to analyze the behavior of machine learning models on particular text fragments as a proxy for human judgments. In order to explore aspects of the texts associated with literariness, we divide the texts of the novels in chunks of 2--3 pages and create vector space representations using topic models (Latent Dirichlet Allocation) and neural document embeddings (Distributed Bag-of-Words Paragraph Vectors). We analyze the semantic complexity of the novels using distance measures, supporting the notion that literariness can be partly explained as a deviation from the norm. Furthermore, we build predictive models and identify specific keywords and stylistic markers related to literariness. While genre plays a role, we find that the greater part of factors affecting judgments of literariness are explicable in bag-of-words terms,even in short text fragments and among novels with higher literary ratings. The code and notebook used to produce the results in this paper are available at https://github.com/andreasvc/litvecspace

Literary quality in the eye of the Dutch reader:The National Reader Survey

What makes some novels literary? There is little agreement within literary studies on this question. The two main approaches focus either on text-intrinsic factors (e.g., aesthetic, stylistic), or text-extrinsic social factors (e.g., author prestige, critics). Until now, there has not been a comprehensive study taking both text-intrinsic and social factors into account. The project The Riddle of Literary Quality examines both factors by connecting literary texts to the appreciation of those texts: can we identify textual characteristics that are connected to readers’ literary appraisal of texts? In this paper, we describe the development of The National Reader Survey and present some results. The National Reader Survey is a large online survey of Dutch readers with about 14,000 respondents; its purpose is to collect readers’ literary appraisal of texts. We asked readers to rate both read and unread novels on a scale of 1–7 for their literary and overall quality. The agreement amongst respondents on which recent Dutch language novels are of high literary quality and which are not was greater than expected. Motivations respondents gave for their ratings show that the notion of literary quality is a familiar one and respondents most commonly relate it to two elements: the first is the text itself—style, structure, plot and layers; and the second is genre—if a novel is considered a ‘genre’ novel (e.g., suspense, romantic, fantasy), its chances of obtaining a high rating on literary quality are small. These results indicate how entwined social and text-intrinsic factors are. We also touch upon project results which make use of the survey dat

Replication and Computational Literary Studies

The "replication crisis" that has been raging in fields like Psychology (Open Science Collaboration 2015) or Medicine (Ioannidis 2005) for years has recently reached the field of Artificial Intelligence (Barber 2019). One of the key conferences in the field, NeurIPS, has reacted by appointing 'reproducibility chairs' in their organizing committee. In the Digital Humanities, and particularly in Computational Literary Studies (CLS), there is an increasing awareness of the crucial role played by replication in evidence-based research. Relevant disciplinary developments include the increased importance of evaluation in text analysis and the increased interest in making research transparent through publicly accessible data and code (open source, open data). Specific impulses include Geoffrey Rockwell and Stéfan Sinclair's re-enactments of pre-digital studies (Sinclair and Rockwell 2015) or the recent replication study by Nan Z. Da (Da 2019). The paper has been met by an avalanche of responses that pushed back several of its key claims, including its rather sweeping condemnation of the replicated papers. However, an important point got buried in the process: that replication is indeed a valuable goal and practice. As stated in the Open Science Collaboration paper: "Replication can increase certainty when findings are reproduced and promote innovation when they are not" (Open Science Collaboration 2015, 943). As a consequence, the panel aims to raise a number of issues regarding the place, types, challenges and affordances, both on a practical and on a policy or community level, of replication in CLS. Several impulse papers will address key aspects of the issue: recent experience with attempts at replication of specific papers; policies dealing with replication in fields with more experience in the issue; conceptual and terminological clarification with regard to replication studies; and proposals for a way forward with replication as a community task or a policy issue

Check Your Privilege: The Digital Privilege Game

This paper describes the background and development of Check Your Privilege (https://privilege.huc.knaw.nl/), a digital privilege game designed to create awareness in the context of diversity and inclusion workshops

Who Is Hvalbiff? Name and Identity in W. F. Hermans’s “Beyond Sleep”

One of the functions of names in literary texts is Akzentuierung — Anonymisierung (accentuating — anonymizing) (Debus, 2002, 84). By giving a character a certain name, an author can accentuate that name and that character; conversely, by not providing a name where a name could be expected, an author can keep that person anonymous. Both approaches are deviations from ‘normality’. This paper proposes that the accentuating and anonymizing function of literary names can be closely linked to the idea of ‘foregrounding’ as developed in stylis- tic research. To illustrate this, this paper presents an analysis of the accentuating and anonymizing use of personal names in the novel Beyond Sleep (1966) by Willem Frederik Hermans (1921–1995), one of the most important 20th-century Dutch literary authors. This paper shows that the stylistic application of names that have an accentuating or anonymizing function is key to sustaining the plot of Beyond Sleep

Readers and their roles: Evidence from readers of contemporary fiction in the Netherlands

Reading serves many ends. Some readers report that works of fiction provide an imaginative escape from the rigors of life, others report reading in order to be intellectually challenged. While various characterizations of readers’ engagement with prose fiction have been proposed, few have been checked using representative samples of readers. Our research reports on reader self-descriptions observed in a representative sample of 501 adults in the Netherlands. Reader self-descriptions exhibit regularities, with certain self-descriptions predicting others. Contrary to existing theories which posit two types of readers characterized by non-overlapping concerns (identifying readers and distanced readers), we find that while some readers attend to plot structure or read in order to be intellectually challenged, reader self-descriptions overlap more than received theories predict. We hypothesize that some readers have cultivated more reading techniques than others, with educated or experienced readers tending to report deriving additional experiences from reading