Lecture: Distant Reading by Stylometry

Date and Time: March 18th and 25th 6:00 PM ~ 7:30 PM

Speaker: Dr. Jan Rybicki

This workshop will introduce participants to the field of stylometry. An introductory lecture shows the main tenets, methods and achievements (and failures) of the field, together with examples of research in authorship attribution and distant reading. In the following hands-on workshop that will then continue on the second day, the participants will be acquainted with stylo, a package for the statistical programming environment R co-written by the instructor. This package is a way to avoid R’s steep learning curve so that humanists can easily perform advanced quantitative analyses of texts. While stylo has its own built-in visualization tools, the second part of the workshop will also introduce gephi, a piece of network analysis software. Finally, the participants will be challenged to perform their first own analyses on their own collections of texts or on those provided for them. No programming skills are required!