Karina van Dalen-Oskam

Delta for Middle Dutch—Author and Copyist Distinction in Walewein

The Middle Dutch Arthurian romance Roman van Walewein (‘Romance of Gawain’) is attributed in the text itself to two authors, Penninc and Vostaert. Very little quantitative research into this dual authorship has been done. This article describes our progress in applying different non-traditional authorship attribution methods to the text of Walewein. After providing an introduction to the romance and an overview of earlier research, we evaluate previous statements on authorship and stylistics by applying both Yules measure of lexical richness and Burrowss Delta. To find out whether these new methods would confirm or even enhance our present knowledge about the differences between the two authors, we applied an adapted version of John Burrowss Delta procedure. The adapted version seems to be able to distinguish the double authorship of the romance. It also helps us to confirm some and to reject other earlier statements about the position in the text where the second author started his work.

Names in novels: An experiment in computational stylistics

Proper names in literary texts have different functions. The most important one in real life, identification, is only one of these. Some others are to make the fiction more ‘real’ or to present ideas about a character by using a name with certain meanings or associations to manipulate the reader’s expectations. A description of the functions of a certain name in a certain text becomes relevant when the researcher can point out how it compares to the functions of other names and names in other texts. The article describes how research into names in literary texts needs a quantitative approach to reach a higher level of relevancy. To get a first impression of what may be normal in literary texts, a corpus of twenty-two Dutch and twenty-two English novels and ten translations into the other language in both sets were gathered. The occurrences of all names in these novels have been tagged for those data categories that seemed useful for the literary stylistic research planned. Some first results of the statistics are presented and the use of the approach is illustrated by means of an analysis of the use of geographical names in the Dutch novel Boven is het stil by Gerbrand Bakker and its English translation by David Colmer, The Twin. In the evaluation of the results, special attention is paid to the status of currently available digital tools for named entity recognition and classification, followed by a wish-list for the tools that this kind of research really needs. .................................................................................................................................................................................

Cultures of Formalization: Towards an encounter between humanities and computing

The past three decades have seen several waves of interest in developing crossovers between academic research and computing; molecular biology is often cited as the prime exemplar of ‘what computation can do for a field’. The humanities and social sciences have also been the terrain of such interactions,at times through bottom-up collaborations, and at times through concerted policy-driven efforts (Wouters and Beaulieu 2006). The main developments vary across national contexts and disciplines. In our local context (in the Netherlands), we can roughly identify the following waves: the ‘history and computing’ and ‘literature and computing’ efforts of the 1970s and 1980s;the collaboratory and infrastructure discussions of the last decade; the current efforts at developing computational humanities, and recent emphasis on virtual research environments (VREs) of which Alfalab1 can be regarded as an example.

Epistolary voices. The case of Elisabeth Wolff and Agatha Deken

The article focuses on two related issues: authorship distinction and the analysis of characters’ voices in fiction. It deals with the case of Elisabeth Wolff and Agatha Deken, two women writers from the Netherlands who collaboratively published several epistolary novels at the end of the 18th century. First, the task division between the two authors will be analysed based on their usage of words and their frequencies. Next, any stylistic differences between the characters (letter writers) will be dealt with. The focus lies on Wolff’s and Deken’s first joint novel, Sara Burgerhart (1782). As to the authorship, nothing clearly showed a clear task division, which implies that Deken’s and Wolff’s writing styles are very much alike. This confirms findings of other scholars, who found that collaborating authors jointly produce a style that is distinguishable from both authors’ personal styles. As to stylistic differences in the voices of the characters in Sara Burgerhart, it was found that only a couple of the letter writers are clearly distinguishable compared with the main characters in the novel. I experimented with two possible tools to zoom in on the exact differences between those characters, but the methods are still too subjective to my taste. In the follow-up research, I will look further than words and their frequencies as building stones of literary style.