When you read novel what draws you in are the characters, the fictional people,
what's really interesting is how fictional people are like or not like
real human beings. To find out what it is about Oliver Twist or Scrooge or Lady
Dedlock it's important to also look at the people around Oliver, to look at
the other characters in A Christmas Carol, or to look at the whole cast in
Bleak House. Even better is to look at lots of other fictional people in novels
buy other authors and once you start talking about a lot of characters, a lot
of novels, a lot of texts, then your problem really becomes more like a data
science problem. Now for an author like Charles Dickens you might wonder what
computational methods can help us find that generations of literary critics
haven't discussed yet. To address this question, together with a group of
colleagues, we've developed the web application CLiC.
CLiC is very a much developing resource so at present
there are about 150 books in CLiC and about 16 million words.
There are not just texts by Dickens there's also George Eliot,
Oscar Wilde, Mary Braddon, Elizabeth Gaskell, and others.
When you read a text on the page it's very easy for you to spot striking words or to find
repetitions within a short space of text, what is much more difficult is to see
whether there any subtle patterns, whether there are any repetitions that
are spaced out a lot more, and this is where the CLiC application has assisted
in gaining major new insights into fiction. One is particularly around the
way in which fictional characters speak to one another so we can find phrases
like "It seems to me that", "I don't know what" - so phrases that are not just in
one novel, that are not particular to a specific character, but that are common
across novels that are common in the language in general and are also used by
us as readers. So such phrase are
a lot more subtle than Scrooge saying "Humbug!" or Mr Snagby talking about
"not to put too fine a point upon it" - it's corpus linguistic methods that help us
identify such phrases. Another important area of communication is body language,
novels are such a rich source of body language because the narrator has to
describe for the reader what isn't there to see, but it still needs to be
visualised, and here again CLiC can help us find patterns of body language
descriptions in the language. If you look at a text like Hard Times, for instance, any
reader will spot that there's Mr Bounderby and he tends to have his hands
in his pockets, because in Hard Times hands are also used to refer to the factory
people, so body language has a very specific meaning. But there are lot of
people in fiction who have their hands occasionally in their pockets and this
is an important pointer to much more historical or social patterns that are
less direct, more subtle to find when you just read the text.
Another example is the phrase "with his back to the fire" - that's a particular phrase
that's used a lot in the nineteenth century but is mainly used for men,
it's men make their back to the fire, this is not a pose for women, this is a pose that
has to do with power and it's also to do with fashion again because long skirts
could easily catch fire and long skirts were alone fire hazard in the
nineteenth century. Once we start looking at such more subtle general patterns
we're in a much better position to really look at gendered behaviour,
structures of fictional society, stereotypes, and then we can much better
assess the relationship between people in fiction, fictional worlds, and the real world.
We're also much better able to
contextualize individual novels so we can say something about particular
writing styles. There's still Dickens's very specific style but corpus
linguistic methods help us to get a much more nuanced view of what Dickens does
with the language and what makes his writing unique. By developing the
CLiC web application we are aiming to provide analytical tools that are easy
to use and can also be brought into the literature classroom. In this way they
can support teachers, but they can also generate new insight and new interest
into classic texts. By combining the study of literature and a study of
fiction with computational methods we, are able to demonstrate that traditional
divisions between disciplines are much less hard and fast than we'd like to
believe. A lot of big data that we talk about so much today is language data
corpus linguistics, as the data science of language studies,
makes an important contribution, a humanities contribution, to data science.