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Arts and Humanities Commons

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English Language and Literature

University of South Carolina

2020

Digital humanities

Articles 1 - 2 of 2

Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities

Calculating A Hero: Computational Analysis And Chivalry In Chaucer’S The Canterbury Tales, Alexander Handley Humphreys Jul 2020

Calculating A Hero: Computational Analysis And Chivalry In Chaucer’S The Canterbury Tales, Alexander Handley Humphreys

Theses and Dissertations

This project aims to provide a basis by which distant reading techniques may be applied to Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales. The critical corpus is oddly devoid of studies examining these techniques as tools for understanding Chaucer’s work. This paper endeavors to rectify this gap by demonstrating the kinds of insights made available by computational distant reading techniques as described by Johanna Drucker, Matthew Jockers and Jerome Bellegarda, among others. This study is founded on the belief that close reading and other forms of analysis needlessly exclude a broader view of the target work. It is not my intention in this …


Text Mining Contemporary Popular Fiction: Natural Language Processing-Derived Themes Across Over 1,000 New York Times Bestsellers And Genre Fiction Novels, Morgan Lundy Apr 2020

Text Mining Contemporary Popular Fiction: Natural Language Processing-Derived Themes Across Over 1,000 New York Times Bestsellers And Genre Fiction Novels, Morgan Lundy

Theses and Dissertations

This study endeavors to apply computational methods to a large dataset of popular fictional material, to see what topics emerge when viewed across genre lines and from a new, “machine” perspective. The dataset consists of 1,136 popular and commercially successful novels published between 2005 and 2016, including New York Times bestsellers and “genre fiction,” including science fiction, young adult, romance and mystery novels. Methods are discussed, including dataset preparation, LDA topic modeling and topic number optimization, qualitative topic interpretation, data analysis and visualization. The experiment was conducted in two parts, with the "document" or unit of analysis as each full …