Does Late Style Exist?

This repository contains code and prose related to a computational literary analysis which attempt to test literary critical claims of authorial periodicity known as "late style," and popularized most recently by Edward Said's book On Late Style.

Slides

A presentation from the Digital Humanities 2018 conference, showcasing some early results is available here on my website.

Contents

• Single-author corpora used are in /bibliography.
  • everyone.csv contains the full corpus used for the larger "corpus B" analysis, created using Corpus-DB
  • late-style.bib is a BibTeX file containing references to academic books and articles discussing late style. If you know of any others I'm missing, please let me know! And/or submit a pull request with the changes.
• /paper contains a very early draft of a paper, which discusses very preliminary results. Warning: this doesn't represent the current state of the project!
• late-style-PCA.ipynb is the first attempt at this experiment, using a small, curated corpus.
• late-style-rewrite.ipynb is the first attempt at the more probabilistic, Bayesian approach to this problem.
• late-style-rewrite-everyone.ipynb tests "corpus B," about 51 authors, and about 1K texts from Project Gutenberg
• late-style-rewrite-everyone.ipynb tests "corpus B" again, but uses semantic document embeddings instead of word frequencies

License

GPLv3. See LICENSE.md.

Contributing

I could use some help with this! Get in touch, or open a new issue. Pull requests are also welcome.