A Question of Style: individual voices and corporate identity in the Edinburgh Review, 1814-1820

Benatti, Francesca and King, David (2017). A Question of Style: individual voices and corporate identity in the Edinburgh Review, 1814-1820. In: 49th Annual Conference of The Research Society for Victorian Periodicals: Borders and Border Crossings, 27-29 Jul 2017, University of Freiburg, Germany.

Abstract

We report on the progress of our project A Question of Style: individual voices and corporate identity in the Edinburgh Review, 1814-1820, which is funded by the first RSVP Field Development Grant during January-October 2017. In our proposal, our stated aim was to assess the assumption that early nineteenth-century periodicals succeeded in creating, through a “transauthorial discourse”, a unified corporate voice that hid individual authors behind an impersonal public text (Klancher 1987).

We know that in order to achieve this goal, we need to cross the borders between Humanities and Computing research. This presentation discusses how our research is progressing in both areas and will focus on:

• Corpus creation: we will discuss the challenges of creating a sample corpus of approximately 500,000 words (325,000 words from the Edinburgh Review, 175,000 from the Quarterly Review)
• Post-OCR processes: we will talk through the development of our suite of Python scripts to assist OCR correction, metadata creation and textual markup, based on our previous work with post-OCR text curation (King 2013) and semi-automated TEI markup (Willis et al 2010)
• "Operationalization”: we will share our evolving definition of style using methods taken from periodical studies, book history, computational linguistics and computational stylistics (Moretti, 2013)
• Analysis: we will present our ongoing stylistic analysis and evaluate it within the context of both literary scholarship on nineteenth-century periodicals and computational linguistics scholarship, discussing how we are employing literary and historical interpretation to generate critical knowledge out of our quantitative measurements

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