Introducing the Computational Stylistics Group

At the end of 2021, with the support of the Wacław Felczak Foundation, the journal Digitális Bölcsészet (Digital Humanities) published a special issue introducing the work of the Kraków-based Computational Stylistics Group to Hungarian readers. The full issue is available here (in Hungarian).

The Kraków group is an internationally recognised centre of computational stylistics. Its members are behind a number of useful tools and studies, including stylo, a package for the R programming language.

Contents

• Joanna Byszuk, Botond Szemes: A krakkói Computational Stylistics Group bemutatkozása. Előszó a Digitális Bölcsészet folyóirat különszámához (Introducing the Kraków Computational Stylistics Group. Preface to the special issue of Digitális Bölcsészet)
• Maciej Eder: Elena Ferrante. Egy „virtuális” szerző? (Elena Ferrante: a “virtual” author?)
• Jan Rybicki: Vive la différence! Írók nemének azonosítása többváltozós szógyakorisági elemzések során (Identifying authors’ gender with multivariate word-frequency analysis)
• Greta Franzini et al.: Szerzőazonosítás Jacob és Wilhelm Grimm zajos, digitalizált levelezésében (Authorship attribution in the noisy, digitised correspondence of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm)
• Artjoms Šeļa et al.: Gyenge műfajok: a versmérték és a jelentés közötti kapcsolat modellezése az orosz költészetben (Weak genres: modelling the relationship between metre and meaning in Russian poetry)
• Albert Leśniak, Zbigniew Pasek: Neoprotestáns és katolikus tanúságtételek a korpuszalapú diskurzuselemzés perspektívájából (Neo-Protestant and Catholic testimonies from the perspective of corpus-based discourse analysis)
• Helena Grochala-Szczepanek et al.: A lengyel Szepesség tájnyelvének korpusznyelvészeti elemzése (A corpus-linguistic analysis of the dialect of Polish Spiš)

Launch and workshop

The issue was launched on 6 May 2022 at the Department of Digital Humanities of ELTE’s Faculty of Humanities, as part of a day-long event on computational stylistics (stylometry). The event had two parts: a workshop led by members of the Kraków group, and the launch itself, where the authors were interviewed by Zsolt Almási, editor of the journal and associate professor at the Institute of English and American Studies of Pázmány Péter Catholic University, and Botond Szemes, editor of the special issue and member of the Department of Digital Humanities.

The workshop focused on stylo, the software package developed by the Computational Stylistics Group. It covers every step of stylometric research, from preparing corpora and setting the parameters of frequency analysis, through statistical procedures on the results, to calculating the similarity or difference of texts and visualising their relationships. The introductory morning session and the afternoon demonstration for “advanced” users may give real impetus to stylometric and digital humanities research in Hungary, which has so far been carried out in a less controlled way.

The event was likewise organised by the I.T.E.M. Foundation with the support of the Wacław Felczak Foundation.