Ep. 26 - Panel 6B - Part 2 - Digital literary criticism and the end of history - Chris Beausang (MU)

NPPSH Conference

The aim of this paper will be to present a sequence of results obtained from i) a network-based analysis created through the 'Stylo' package (a library developed within the statistical programming language R for the quantitative analysis of literary data), and ii) a network-based visualisation generated in the open-source software package Gephi. This analysis reflects an attempt to develop a definition of literary style by the comparison of word frequencies embedded in two corpora, the first of which will be composed of just over 250 modernist novels, novellas and short story collections, and the second, which will contain 250 works written and published during the victorian era. In addition to outlining the process by which this analysis was arrived at, this paper will consider some of the methodological tensions surrounding computational methods operationalised within the context of literary studies. As a discipline, the study of literature has become increasingly indebted to analyses of broader cultural and historical trends at the expense of an attention to generic developments inculcated by particular authors or works. This has resulted in an ambivalence with regard to the sorts of categorical reasoning required in order for computational analyses such as this one to function. This paper will therefore suggest a means of productively fusing the dialectical materialism of contemporary literary studies with stylometry without doing a disservice to experimental design or seeking to re-animate a retrograde formalism. Chris Beausang is a second year doctoral student in An Foras Feasa in Maynooth University under the supervision of Professor Susan Schreibman. He completed his undergraduate degree in English Studies and his MPhil in Digital Humanities & Culture in Trinity College Dublin, and has written dissertations on Roddy Doyle's historical fiction and quantitative approaches to the prose style of Samuel Beckett. His research investigates the development of modernist literary style through computational methods.