A missing president?

Analysis of The President is Missing, by James O’Sullivan of University College Cork.

The answer is quite conclusive: ‘The accompanying graph represents the novel on the x-axis, broken into segments: the thicker the bottom line, the more certain the proximity to the relevant author’s style. Considering Patterson’s fingerprint is represented by green, it is plain to see that, contrary to our previous study, this is a co-authored novel in which he was the scribe.’

Of course, as O’Sullivan points out himself, we need to stay wary where the genre signal comes in to make life complicated (no fictional writing of Clinton’s could be used for the study, simply because there isn’t any). However, there is good reason to assume that the authorial signal here trumps the genre signal.

Finally, O’Sullivan points out another important dimension of that particular collaboration: that of the market. “What better way to sell a book, than to have a mogul of commuter fiction combine with a former US president?”

Interestingly, according to both Lane and O’Sullivan, it is the former US president who does raise his voice towards the end of the novel, contributing a finishing touch, or rather, a finishing strike to the tale:

“…there’s the chutzpah with which Clinton (Patterson, I would suggest, may have stepped aside at this stage) waits until the twilight of the novel and then, like Tolstoy, squares his shoulders and expounds, in fiction-free form, his politico-historical thoughts.” (Lane)

… and this is what it sounds like:

“I want the United States to be free and prosperous, peaceful and secure, and constantly improving for all generations to come.”

I’d like to conclude that the current state of world history is clearly up for political debate, while the novel is naturally subject of an aesthetic one. Meanwhile, O’Sullivan’s article is a great stylometry story –  and we look foward to more of those.

DLS Resources: Journal of Cultural Analytics

Today, we’re beginning our series of DLS-resources with a very brief introduction of the Journal of Cultural Analytics (CA).

CA is an open-access journal dedicated to the computational study of culture. The journal currently features three sections: Articles reporting peer-reviewed new scholarship, Data Sets that facilitate cultural studies accompanied by discussions; and Debates offering interventions into current discussions surrounding the computational analysis of culture. The Clusters section provides an overview of the various themes or special issues addressed by the journal.

CA’s latest special issue is organized by the NovelTM research team. Its theme is “Identity.” Articles for this issue are posted successively, starting with the Introduction by Susan Brown and Laura Mandell and an article on The Transformation of Gender in English-Language Fiction by Ted Underwood, David Bamman, and Sabrina Lee.

 

Doing Digital Literary Stylistics!

SIG-DLS Resources and Events

On this blog, SIG-DLS members publish posts on resources and events relevant to our SIG. The posts introduce best practices, data and tools, but also journals, research groups, blogs, initiatives (including pedagogical ones), as well as reports of events.

So far there are two types of posts:
– Resources: Posts on resources such as tools, corpora, or coding manuals give a short narrative account of what a particular resource is and how it relates to DLS, possibly including a use case, in 200-500 words.
– Event Reports: Posts that report on conferences, workshops, courses (and so on) do so in addressing important, interesting, difficult issues for our group, values and priorities.

Would you like to introduce your resource in the SIG-DLS blog or report on a digital literary stylistics event? Please let us know: berenike[dot]herrmann[at]unibas[dot]ch