Literary and Linguistic Computing - recent issues

Introduction

Ore, E. S., Gallet-Blanchard, L., Opas-Hanninen, L. L. — 2008-03-14

Developing Integrated Editions of Minority Language Dictionaries: The Irish Example

Nyhan, J. — 2008-03-14

The Corpus of Electronic Texts (CELT) project at University College Cork is an on-line corpus of multilingual texts that are encoded in TEI conformant SGML/XML. As of September 2006, the corpus has 9.3 million words online. Over the last five years, doctoral work carried out at the project has focused on the development of lexicographical resources spanning the years c. AD 700–1700, and on the development of tools to integrate the corpus with these resources. This research has been further complimented by the Linking Dictionaries and Text project, a North–South Ireland collaboration between the University of Ulster, Coleraine, and University College Cork. The Linking Dictionaries and Text project will reach completion in October 2006. This article focuses on CELT's latest research project, the Digital Dinneen project, that aims to create an integrated edition of Patrick S. Dinneen's Foclóir Gaedhilge agus Béarla (Irish-English Dictionary). In this article, the newly developed research infrastructure—that is the culmination of the doctoral research carried out at CELT and the Linking Dictionaries and Text collaboration—will be described, and ways that the Digital Dinneen will be integrated into this infrastructure established. Finally, avenues of future research will be pointed to.

Cross-collection Searching: A Pandora's Box or the Holy Grail?

Schreibman, S., Roper, J. O., Gueguen, G. — 2008-03-14

As digital libraries have expanded to absorb existing collections as well as to create new ones, it has become clear that cross collection discovery is not simply desirable, but is increasingly a necessity demanded by users. Similarly, in the digital humanities community, thematic research collections once distinct from one another now would seem to benefit from interoperability. However, efforts to aggregate disparate resources are often stymied by differing metadata schema and controlled vocabulary. Using the lessons learned from the Thomas MacGreevy Archive, The University of Maryland Libraries designed its digital repository to provide for discovery across object types and collections using Fedora as the underlying architecture. To facilitate access to multiple collections within one repository, University of Maryland developed a flexible metadata standard. This metadata schema is used to describe varying types of materials at varying levels of granularity, while allowing for controlled vocabularies appropriate to specific collections.

The Exhibition Problem. A Real-life Example with a Suggested Solution

Eide, O. — 2008-03-14

As the number of scholarly encoded digital texts is increasing, creating models of these kinds of texts with the help of digital tools is becoming more and more interesting. In connection with this type of work, it is important to have a clear understanding of what these particular models are based on. They will clearly be based on certain readings of the source texts, but we need to keep track of the relationships between the texts, readings of the texts and the models based on such readings.

In this article, a problem of potentially great significance for this kind of modelling is discussed. The problem is called the exhibition problem and is based on the difference in ordinary linguistic communication between asserting a fact, e.g. that a certain person has a certain name, and exhibiting the same fact. In many cases, the latter is modelled as if it was the former. As a solution to this problem, an event-oriented modelling method is proposed.

The Inhibition of Geographical Information in Digital Humanities Scholarship

Jessop, M. — 2008-03-14

Information about place and location is an essential part of research in the humanities. There are many ways that methods and tools for structuring, visualizing and analysing space, spatial behaviour, and spatial relationships can benefit humanities research but the use of spatial information in digital scholarship by humanists remains very limited. The developing role of the study of place and location through geographical information systems (GIS) and other digital tools is discussed briefly before examining the factors that are inhibiting the use of spatial data in our research. The influences of current research practice and the attitudes of scholarly institutions in the humanities are examined. This article will explore some of the potential research applications but, possibly more importantly; it will also examine why that potential is being developed so slowly and discuss a possible way forward for the community.

BE and HAVE: Qualities and Shortcomings

Labrosse, P. — 2008-03-14

This article examines the hypothesis that a speaker uses the HAVE + noun construction when (s)he wants to express somebody's positive qualities. This hypothesis was tested with two different corpora using two different retrieval programs. The numerous steps that are necessary show that it can take a considerable amount of time to reach sound conclusions and suggests the need to improve the building of those corpora or their retrieval software programs. ² and z-score tests were used to analyse the results. The above hypothesis proves to be too strong: although the verb HAVE is never significantly associated more frequently with shortcomings, the verb BE is sometimes associated more frequently with qualities. The lists of qualities and shortcomings expressed with HAVE or with BE show that BE collocates with a wider range of qualities than shortcomings. These lists also indicate that the qualities often quoted by the theoretical linguist are not those most frequently found in corpora. They also point to differences between the qualities that collocate with HAVE and those that collocate with BE. The use of corpora enabled me to widen the range of qualities or shortcomings that are said to collocate with HAVE or BE, and revealed that, contrary to the hypothesis, the HAVE + noun construction can apply to inanimate subject referents.

The Identification of Spelling Variants in English and German Historical Texts: Manual or Automatic?

Pilz, T., Ernst-Gerlach, A., Kempken, S., Rayson, P., Archer, D. — 2008-03-14

In this article, we describe the respective approaches we have taken when addressing issues of spelling variation in German and English historical texts. More specifically, we describe an experiment to evaluate automatic techniques for the development of letter replacement heuristics against manually created gold standards of known letter replacements rules. As will become clear, the motivation for the research differs according to the team of researchers: the German researchers are seeking to develop a search engine for historical texts; the English researchers want to improve the results obtained when applying corpus linguistic techniques (developed for modern language) to historical data. However, the respective teams do share a longer term goal of assessing whether it is possible to develop a generic spelling detection tool for Indo-European languages.

Killer Applications in Digital Humanities

Juola, P. — 2008-03-14

The emerging discipline of ‘digital humanities’ has been plagued by a perceived neglect on the part of the broader humanities community. The community as a whole tends not to be aware of the tools developed by DH practitioners (as documented by the recent surveys by Siemens et al.), and tends not to take seriously many of the results of scholarship obtained by DH methods and tools. This article argues for a focus on deliverable results in the form of useful solutions to common problems that humanities scholars share, instead of simply new representations. The question to address is what needs the humanities community has that can be dealt with using DH tools and techniques, or equivalently what incentive humanists have to take up and to use new methods. This can be treated in some respects like the computational quest for the ‘killer application’—a need of the user group that can be filled, and by filling it, create an acceptance of that tool and the supporting methods/results. Some definitions and examples are provided both to illustrate the idea and to support why this is necessary. The apparent alternative is the status quo, where digital research tools are brilliantly developed, only to languish in neglect and disuse.

If You Build It Will They Come? The LAIRAH Study: Quantifying the Use of Online Resources in the Arts and Humanities through Statistical Analysis of User Log Data

Warwick, C., Terras, M., Huntington, P., Pappa, N. — 2008-03-14

There are now many online, digital resources in the humanities, and their creation is funded by various governmental, academic, and philanthropic sources. What happens to these resources after completion is very poorly understood. No systematic survey of digital resource usage in the humanities has ever been undertaken—and the factors for use and non-use of digital resources are unknown. The LAIRAH (Log Analysis of Internet Resources in the Arts and Humanities) Project is a 15-month long study into the factors which determine long-term use and neglect of digital resources in the Arts and Humanities. Using quantitative Deep Log Analysis techniques to understand real-time user behaviour and qualitative user workshops to gain an understanding of user approaches to digital resources in the arts and humanities, the study identifies factors that may predispose a digital resource to become used or neglected in the long-term. This article provides an overview of the techniques used in the LAIRAH project, and presents some preliminary results that may be of use to both the creators of digital resources in the humanities, and the funders of these projects, to ensure that significant intellectual effort and time, and financial resources, are not wasted in the creation of projects that are then neglected by the user community.

Digital Humanities 2006: When Two Became Many

Archer, D. — 2008-03-14

Computer Models of Musical Creativity: A Review of Computer Models of Musical Creativity by David Cope

Wiggins, G. A. — 2008-03-14

Electronic Textual Editing. Lou Burnard, Katherine O'Brien O'Keeffe, and John Unsworth (eds).

Van Raemdonck, B. — 2008-03-14

The Future of the Book in the Digital Age. Bill Cope and Angus Phillips (eds).

Deegan, M. — 2008-03-14

Corpus Linguistics 25 Years on. * Facchinetti, Roberta (ed.).

De Pauw, G. — 2008-03-14

Corpus Linguistics Beyond the Word-Corpus Research from Phrase to Discourse. * Eileen Fitzpatrick (ed.).

Luyckx, K. — 2008-03-14

Deep Time of the Media: Toward an Archaeology of Hearing and Seeing by Technical Means. * Siegfried Zielinski. Translated by Gloria Custance.

McCarty, W. — 2008-03-14

New Media Poetics: Contexts, Technotexts, and Theories. * Adalaide Morris and Thomas Swiss (eds).

Hesemeier, S. — 2008-03-14

Language Change Quantification Using Time-separated Parallel Translations

Altintas, K., Can, F., Patton, J. M. — 2007-10-26

We introduce a systematic approach to language change quantification by studying unconsciously used language features in time-separated parallel translations. For this purpose, we use objective style markers such as vocabulary richness and lengths of words, word stems and suffixes, and employ statistical methods to measure their changes over time. In this study, we focus on the change in Turkish in the second half of the twentieth century. To obtain word stems, we first introduce various stemming techniques and show that they are highly effective. Our statistical analyses show that over time, for both text and lexicon, the length of Turkish words has become significantly longer, and word stems have become significantly shorter. We also show that suffix lengths have become significantly longer for types and the vocabulary richness based on word stems has shrunk significantly. These observations indicate that in contemporary Turkish one would use more suffixes to compensate for the fewer stems to preserve the expressive power of the language at the same level. Our approach can be adapted for quantifying the change in other languages.

The Navajo Language Literature Project: A Case Study in Client-side Design Patterns Using Asynchronous Requests

Canfield, K. — 2007-10-26

The Navajo Language Literature Project was established to create and deliver a web-based, digital library of Navajo language texts. The current focus is to deliver the texts on the web and allow collaborative editing for linguistic detail such as word parses and glosses. The original implementation of the project used a server-side design for the Internet applications. The addition of asynchronous update to the server for this project gave the client web application more responsibility and started a line of inquiry into how much processing can be pushed to the web browser client. A major advantage of this move is a simplification of deployment that can be beneficial for small and unfunded projects in the humanities. The case study below defines and parameterizes a model for this client-side pattern.

Bigrams of Syntactic Labels for Authorship Discrimination of Short Texts

Hirst, G., Feiguina, O. — 2007-10-26

We present a method for authorship discrimination that is based on the frequency of bigrams of syntactic labels that arise from partial parsing of the text. We show that this method, alone or combined with other classification features, achieves a high accuracy on discrimination of the work of Anne and Charlotte Brontë, which is very difficult to do by traditional methods. Moreover, high accuracies are achieved even on fragments of text little more than 200 words long.

Syntactic Positions of Prepositional Phrases in the History of Chinese: Using the Developing Sheffield Corpus of Chinese for Diachronic Linguistic Studies

Hu, X., McLaughlin, J., Williamson, N. — 2007-10-26

This paper reports the completion of the first expansion phase of the Sheffield Corpus of Chinese (SCC). We describe the major improvements we made in expanding the corpus. They involve the coverage of time periods, choice of text types and categories, and selection of individual texts; the mark up scheme and the integral search and analysis tool. We use the developing SCC to examine Li and Thompson's; (1974, 1975, 1976) controversial postverbal predominance hypothesis for prepositional phrases (PPs) in Archaic Chinese and their word order change hypothesis for PPs in general in the history of the Chinese language. Our study provides no evidence for the postverbal predominance hypothesis for PPs in Archaic Chinese and the word order change hypothesis for PPs in general from postverbal in Archaic Chinese to preverbal in Modern Chinese. Our findings show that postverbal and preverbal PPs have been in coexistence and there have always been more occurrences of preverbal PPs than postverbal PPs in all the time periods covered in the current SCC. Although use of some PPs declined in some time periods and use of others emerged in other time periods, there was never a predominant position for PPs in any time period in the history of Chinese. We show differences in the distribution of PPs in different time periods and provide an account of the syntactic positions of PPs in those time periods.

Goldsmith and the Busy Body

Dixon, P., Mannion, D. — 2007-10-26

Assessments of Goldsmith's contribution to the Busy Body have fluctuated widely. We examine the ten possible attributions, gathering evidence from verbal parallels, selected linguistic features, and measures of sentence-length, together with idiosyncrasies of vocabulary and syntax in the ‘doubtful’ essays themselves. We conclude that apart from the essay on London clubs, which he later acknowledged, only one piece can be attributed to Goldsmith with any confidence.

Goldsmith's Contributions to the Weekly Magazine

Dixon, P., Mannion, D. — 2007-10-26

Fifteen items in the Weekly Magazine have been attributed to Goldsmith. Our study uses traditional kinds of internal evidence (mainly verbal parallels) together with evidence from selected linguistic features. A preliminary analysis identifies features which best distinguish Goldsmith samples from those of a number of contemporary authors. Using this selection of features, we calculate the distances of the fifteen Weekly items from the cluster of Goldsmith samples; an item at too large a distance is unlikely to be his. A parallel investigation is based on sentence-length statistics. We conclude that seven essays may plausibly be assigned to Goldsmith, that he probably co-authored two pieces, and that in three cases he merely made minor additions to material from other sources.

Tools for Searching, Annotation and Analysis of Speech, Music, Film and Video A Survey

Marsden, A., Mackenzie, A., Lindsay, A., Nock, H., Coleman, J., Kochanski, G. — 2007-10-26

This article examines the actual and potential use of software tools in research in the arts and humanities focusing on audiovisual (AV) materials such as recorded speech, music, video and film. The quantity of such materials available to researchers is massive and rapidly expanding. Researchers need to locate the material of interest in the vast quantity available, and to organize and process the material once collected. Locating and organizing often depend on metadata and tags to describe the actual content, but standards for metadata for AV materials are not widely adopted. Content-based search is becoming possible for speech, but is still beyond the horizon for music, and even more distant for video. Copyright protection hampers research with AV materials, and Digital Rights Management (DRM) systems threaten to prevent research altogether. Once material has been located and accessed, much research proceeds by annotation, for which many tools exist. Many researchers make some kind of transcription of materials, and would value tools to automate this process. Such tools exist for speech, though with important limits to their accuracy and applicability. For music and video, researchers can make use of visualizations. A better understanding (in general terms) by researchers of the processes carried out by computer software and of the limitations of its results would lead to more effective use of Information and Communications Technology (ICT).

Corpus Stylistics: Speech, Writing, and Thought Presentation in a Corpus of English Writing. Routledge Advances in Corpus Linguistics. * Elena Semino and Mick Short.

Hardy, D. E. — 2007-10-26

REED in Review: Essays in Celebration of the First Twenty-Five Years * Audrey Douglas and Sally-Beth MacLean (eds).

Steggle, M. — 2007-10-26

Quantitative Authorship Attribution: An Evaluation of Techniques

Grieve, J. — 2007-08-13

The basic assumption of quantitative authorship attribution is that the author of a text can be selected from a set of possible authors by comparing the values of textual measurements in that text to their corresponding values in each possible author's writing sample. Over the past three centuries, many types of textual measurements have been proposed, but never before have the majority of these measurements been tested on the same dataset. A large-scale comparison of textual measurements is crucial if current techniques are to be used effectively and if new and more powerful techniques are to be developed. This article presents the results of a comparison of thirty-nine different types of textual measurements commonly used in attribution studies, in order to determine which are the best indicators of authorship. Based on the results of these tests, a more accurate approach to quantitative authorship attribution is proposed, which involves the analysis of many different textual measurements.

Multivariate Analysis of Finnish Dialect Data An Overview of Lexical Variation

Hyvonen, S., Leino, A., Salmenkivi, M. — 2007-08-13

During the process of writing a comprehensive dictionary of Finnish dialects, a large set of maps describing the regional distribution of the dialect words have been compiled in electronic form. In this article, we set out to analyse this corpus of data in order to gain new insight on the variation of Finnish dialects. We use a wide range of multivariate data analysis methods, including principal components analysis, independent components analysis, clustering, and multidimensional scaling. We explain how to preprocess the data to overcome the problem of uneven sampling caused by the way the data has been collected. We discuss the results obtained by these methods and compare them to the traditional view of Finnish dialect groups.

Metamorphosis: Remediation in Early English Books Online (EEBO)

Kichuk, D. — 2007-08-13

Remediation refers to the re-presentation of old media in new media. This article studies remediation in electronic products in library collections, especially the digital facsimile. Early English Books Online (EEBO) is a particularly interesting example, not only because of its scholarly importance, but also because of its multi-layered genesis from printed work to microfilm (Early English Books (EEB)) to digital (EEBO) facsimile, and to the text encoding initiative EEBO-TCP, a joint ProQuest and Text Creation Partnership (TCP) project. The article analyses the impact of filters and limits of remediation in relation to EEBO and its predecessor EEB, such as the choice to duplicate a single copy of a work as bi-tonal black and white images, and to scholarly work.

A Statistical Analysis of Editorial Influence and Author Character Similarities in 1990s New Yorker Fiction

Milkman, K. L., Carmona, R., Gleason, W. — 2007-08-13

We present a quantitative analysis of 442 pieces of fiction published between 5 October 1992 and 17 September 2001 in the New Yorker magazine. We address two independent questions using the same data set. First, we examine whether changes in the Executive Editor or Fiction Editor are associated with significant changes in the type of fiction published at the New Yorker. Second, we examine whether New Yorker authors write fiction more often than not about characters with whom they share demographic traits. We find that changes in Fiction Editor at the New Yorker are associated with numerous significant, quantifiable changes in the magazine's fiction and that these effects are greater than those associated with a change in the New Yorker's Executive Editor. We also find that authors of New Yorker fiction write significantly more often than not about protagonists who share their race, gender, and country of origin and who are within or below their age range. The same is true of secondary characters except in the case of gender.

Discovery of Language Resources on the Web: Information Extraction from Heterogeneous Documents

Pekar, V., Evans, R. — 2007-08-13

The present article is concerned with the problem of automatic database population via information extraction (IE) from web pages obtained from heterogeneous sources, such as those retrieved by a domain crawler. Specifically, we address the task of filling single multi-field templates from individual documents, a common scenario that involves free-format documents with the same communicative goal such as job adverts, CVs, or meeting/seminar announcements. We discuss challenges that arise in this scenario and propose solutions to them at different levels of the processing of web page content. Our main focus is on the issue of information extraction, which we address with a two-step machine learning approach that first aims to determine segments of a page that are likely to contain relevant facts and then delimits specific natural language expressions with which to fill template fields. We also present a range of techniques for the enrichment of web pages with semantic annotations, such as recognition of named entities, domain terminology and coreference resolution, and examine their effect on the information extraction method. We evaluate the developed IE system on the task of automatically populating a database with information on language resources available on the web.

Delta for Middle Dutch Author and Copyist Distinction in Walewein

van Dalen-Oskam, K., van Zundert, J. — 2007-08-13

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 Yule's measure of lexical richness and Burrows's 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 Burrows's 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.

Digital Art and Technical Convergence: A Review of Silicon Remembers Carbon, an Exhibition

Deegan, M. — 2007-08-13

Georeferencing: The Geographic Associations of Information. * Hill, Linda L.

Dunn, S. E. — 2007-08-13

An Approach to Videogame Criticism. * Ian Bogost.

Ramsay, S. — 2007-08-13

Aesthetic Computing. * Fishwick, Paul A. (ed).

Ruecker, S. — 2007-08-13

Challenge and Change in the Information Society. * Susan Hornby and Zoe Clarke (eds).

Terras, M. M. — 2007-08-13