‘Style is the dress of thought.’ Stylometry, or the numbers behind the style 3003-C6K-JK1
1. A brief history of quantitative philological methods.
2. Stylometry as a branch of quantitative linguistics.
3. Distant reading in practice: what can we learn from the quantitative features of titles?
4. An introduction to text statistics: text segmentation (words, forms, lexemes); tagging and disambiguation; n-grams; frequency, rank and their interdependence.
5. Data preparation, data types and their visualisation.
6. Formal metrics: word length, sentence length, sentence depth, average distance between constituents.
7. Lexical metrics: most frequent words (MFW), keywords, collocations, co-occurrences and various methods for their detection; distribution of keywords and most frequent words in the text. Stoplists.
8. Proper nouns in the text. Use of proper noun statistics. Place names and maps.
9. Part-of-speech statistics. Foreign and unrecognised words. Orthographic changes, text segmentation, and statistics.
10. Vocabulary richness and its measures (TTR, logarithmic TTR, Zipf’s Z, Yule’s K, Guiraud’s R, Herdan’s C, Sichel’s measure, vocabulary originality according to Sambor, Baayen’s increment function).
11. Syntactic metrics: depth, measures of syntactic complexity, nominality, linearisation, types of syntactic structures, and use of syntactic tagging.
12. Sentiment and affect analysis: polarisation, dictionary-based methods.
13. Topic analysis: unsupervised, semi-supervised (dictionary-based), embedding.
14. Use of embedding models (word and text similarity, topic analysis).
Short group activities may be part of the classes. Tests and materials on the Kampus platform form an integral part of the course.
Course coordinators
Type of course
Mode
Prerequisites (description)
Learning outcomes
Upon completion of the course students:
are familiar with the basic concepts of quantitative linguistics and their application in style research;
understand the concept of style and can relate it to the author, genre or function;
knows what stylometrics is and is familiar with its areas of application;
knows and understands the methods used in research and their limitations;
can interpret quantitative data obtained from stylometric analysis and apply it to the verification of research hypotheses;
identifies data types and appropriate visualisations for them.
WG_01 to a degree enabling the revision of existing paradigms – the global body of knowledge, encompassing theoretical foundations, general issues and selected specific issues – relevant to the humanities
WG_03 research methodology within the humanities;
Social competences (is prepared to):
KK_03 recognise the priority of knowledge in solving research, cognitive and practical problems within the humanities, whilst respecting the standards of academic work and debate;
KO_01 fulfilling social obligations and taking action in the public interest, particularly in disseminating the results of humanities research using modern communication and technological tools.
Assessment criteria
Final mark is composed as follows:
In-class tests, activities and participation (continuous assessment) — 50%.
Final test — 50%.
Up to 2 unexcused absences are permitted.
Students with no more than 4 unexcused absences, who have taken at least half of the in-class tests, may sit the resit exam.
Breakdown of ECTS credits:
1 ECTS – attendance at classes (30 hours)
2 ECTS – independent preparation for classes and the final assessment (60 hours in total over the semester)
2 ECTS – ongoing assessments and homework (60 hours in total over the semester)
The use of artificial intelligence tools for subject-related tasks must comply with the rules in force at the University of Warsaw, as set out in the following documents:
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Practical placement
NA