“All Thy Wide Geographies”: Reading Whitman’s Epistolary Database

Ashland, Alexander; Schöberlein, Stefan; Blalock, Stephanie M.

doi:10.1017/9781108296830.008

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Principal Component Analysis1

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2021

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“…Whitman even gave copies of his works for free along with these letters to his advocates. In some sense "Whitman was an expert of the social media of his day, and his promotional effort seems to have paid off..." 37 In fact, Whitman disliked the critics in his early career since most of them were negative. One 1856 review even suggested Whitman be sent to an insane asylum.…”

Section: Principal Component Analysismentioning

confidence: 99%

A Computational Approach to Walt Whitman's Stylistic Changes in Leaves of Grass

Zhu¹

2021

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This study analyzes Walt Whitman's stylistic changes in his phenomenal work Leaves of Grass from a computational perspective and relates findings to standard literary criticism on Whitman. The corpus consists of all 7 editions of Leaves of Grass, ranging from the earliest 1855 edition to the 1891-92 "deathbed" edition. Starting from counting word frequencies, the simplest stylometry technique, we find consistent shifts in word choice. Macro-etymological analysis reveals Whitman's increasing preference for words of specific origins, which is correlated to the increasing lexical complexity in Leaves of Grass. Principal component analysis, an unsupervised learning algorithm, reduces the dimensionality of tf-idf vectors to 2 dimensions, providing a straightforward view of stylistic changes. Finally, sentiment analysis shows the evolution of Whitman's emotional state throughout his writing career.

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Section: Principal Component Analysismentioning

confidence: 99%

A Computational Approach to Walt Whitman's Stylistic Changes in Leaves of Grass

Zhu¹

2021

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“All Thy Wide Geographies”: Reading Whitman’s Epistolary Database

Cited by 1 publication

References 9 publications

A Computational Approach to Walt Whitman's Stylistic Changes in Leaves of Grass

A Computational Approach to Walt Whitman's Stylistic Changes in Leaves of Grass

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