DATE: | Wed, Nov 26, 2014 |
TIME: | 12:00 pm |
PLACE: | Council Room (SITE 5-084) |
TITLE: | Computational Investigations of Characterization in Modernist Narration Using Automatically Built Stylistic Lexicons |
PRESENTER: | Julian Brooke University of Toronto |
ABSTRACT: Modernist authors such as Virginia Woolf and James Joyce pioneered the use of "Free Indirect Discourse" (FID), a form of third-person narration which is strongly influenced by the language (in particular, the lexical choice) of a viewpoint character. Unlike traditional approaches to analyzing characterization using common words (such as those based on Burrows 1987), the nature of FID and the sparsity of our data requires that that we understand the stylistic connotations of rarer words and expressions which cannot be gleaned directly from our target texts. To this end, we apply methods introduced in our recent work to derive stylistic information, with regards to six stylistic aspects, from a large corpus of texts from Project Gutenberg. We thus build high-coverage, high-granularity lexicons which include common multiword collocations. Using this information along with student crowdsourced annotations of two modernist texts, To The Lighthouse and The Dead, we first confirm that FID does, at a stylistic level, reflect a mixture of narration and direct speech, and then we investigate the extent to which social attributes (in particular age, class, and gender) of the various characters are reflected in their lexical stylistic profile. |