Visualizing sound as functional n-grams in Homeric Greek poetry

Abstract

This work in progress attempts to examine internal heterogeneity in poetic language using the tools of computer-based authorship analysis. As stylometric tools become finer-grained, scholars such as Hoover (2007) and Andreev (n.d.) have turned their gaze from the characterization of an author or corpus as a whole to considerations of an author’s stylistic evolution over time, and the differences between and even within individual works. The question of the stylistic integrity of Homer’s corpus is a venerable one. For centuries, diverse models, subjective as well as quantitative, have claimed to explain the composition of the Iliad and Odyssey: some scholars have seen it as the work of a single, literate genius (West, 2001, 3); others as a collective multitext, the superposition of generations of continually-changing performances handed down from one illiterate bard to the next (Nagy, 1996, 107 ff.). Often much of the support for these claims is the perceived homo- or heterogeneity of the text. And what is at stake in these examinations is larger than a nineteenthcentury romantic notion of the artist and his genius; recent studies have used th