Analize micro-stilistice în poetica blagiană a materialității

The present study aims to highlight the main occurrences of different material elements in Lucian Blaga’s lyrical work, by focusing on quantitative and micro-stylistic approaches. The quantitative research was made with the help of a digital instrument, Sketch Engine, a relevant tool for research in corpus linguistics and computational stylistics. This study encapsulates the explicit occurences of 22 materials from Lucian Blaga’s poems, categorized into three main groups: metallic materials (ferrous and non-ferrous), non-metallic materials (ceramic/telluric) and rocks and building materials. The analysed material elements are integrated in 317 micro-structures and contexts, the main aspect observed being the ratio between metaphorical and denotative regimes in which materials are included. Starting from distant reading, the article questions a possible cognitive dimension of Lucian Blaga’s poems, which is based on the author’s cultural and philosophical experience.

19. századi magyar regényeken végzett kísérletek a magyar nyelvű szerzőazonosítás leghatékonyabb távolságméréseinek megtalálására

In the field of computational stylistics it is a widespread assumption that there exists a unique pattern of a person’s language use and this is a socalled authorial fingerprint (Baayen et al. 2002). Identifying the authorial fingerprint can become a base of using quantitative text similarity studies for authorship attribution. Although the metaphor of the “fingerprint” may give the false impression that this pattern can be read from the author’s texts in an objective way. The modelling of this “fingerprint” is in fact a creative digital humanities task which constructs a pattern that is based on a selection and combination of dozens of linguistic features that can be interpreted statistically and that can only be interpreted in comparison with other authorial texts. Considering the size of the corpora and the complexity of text characteristics and similarity calculations, the method cannot be done without the use of computer algorithms. There are already some softwares (e.g. R-Stylo, JGAAP, Websty) that apparently offer an accessible way to researchers for analyzing texts, (however these methods limit the process of searching for patterns), while on the other hand it is possible to implement the calculations using custom program codes. In our research we endeavour to find the most efficient measures in authorship attribution for Hungarian texts.

Style at the Scale of the Canon. A Stylometric Analysis of 100 Romanian Novels Published between 1920 and 1940

The present study proposes an experimental exploration of the Romanian novel written between 1920 and 1940 through the use of stylometry, a method of distant reading employed for the statistical analysis of style. Drawing from the most recent advances in the field of computational stylistics, we select a formal standpoint from which we seek to investigate the relation between the Romanian novelistic canon and minor, tertiary novels published in the same. In our test cases, we will attempt to establish some of the more promising aspects of stylometric analysis, as well as single out the experiments that yield no relevant result. Because of the relative novelty of the method, the purpose of our investigations is to offer a kind of pilot experiment that can illustrate the benefits of using computational methods on Romanian literary corpora.

(Neuro-)Cognitive poetics and computational stylistics

This perspective paper discusses four general desiderata of current computational stylistics and (neuro-)cognitive poetics concerning the development of (a) appropriate databases/training corpora, (b) advanced qualitative-quantitative narrative analysis (Q2NA) and machine learning tools for feature extraction, (c) ecologically valid literary test materials, and (d) open-access reader-response data banks. In six explorative computational stylistics studies, it introduces a number of tools that provide QNA indices of the foregrounding potential at the sublexical, lexical, inter- and supralexical levels for poems by Shakespeare, Blake, or Dickens. These concern lexical diversity and aesthetic potential, sentiment analysis, sublexical sonority scores or phrase structure, and topics analysis. The results illustrate the complex interplay of stylistic features and the necessity for theoretical guidance and interdisciplinary cooperation in selecting adequate training corpora, QNA tools, test texts, and response measures.

Journalism and Correspondence

This chapter discusses recent developments in digital technologies and their application to Dickens’s overlapping roles as correspondent, reporter, journalist, and editor. It argues that open-access digitization, digital cataloguing, and computational stylistics open up new possibilities for our understanding of Dickens and his mediation of these roles, revealing new information as to subject matter, style, trends in editorial policy, and patterns of contribution. This information challenges previous author-centred narratives regarding Dickens’s progression from reporter and sketch artist to journalist and editor as well as long-held assumptions regarding his journals Household Words and All the Year Round. In this, digitization follows the current trend in scholarship towards the destabilization of the traditional ideas of Dickens as journalist and editor and acknowledges the changeable and sometimes contradictory nature of his fulfilment of these roles and points to new areas of interest.

Distinguishing Voices in The Waste Land using Computational Stylistics

T. S. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land is a notoriously challenging example of modernist poetry, mixing the independent viewpoints of over ten distinct characters without any clear demarcation of which voice is speaking when. In this work, we apply unsupervised techniques in computational stylistics to distinguish the particular styles of these voices, offering a computer’s perspective on longstanding debates in literary analysis. Our work includes a model for stylistic segmentation that looks for points of maximum stylistic variation, a k-means clustering model for detecting non-contiguous speech from the same voice, and a stylistic profiling approach which makes use of lexical resources built from a much larger collection of literary texts. Evaluating using an expert interpretation, we show clear progress in distinguishing the voices of The Waste Land as compared to appropriate baselines, and we also offer quantitative evidence both for and against that particular interpretation.