Identifying themes in fiction: A centroid-based lexical clustering approach

Abstract

In recent years, numerous computational methods have been developed that have been widely used in humanities and literary studies. In spite of the potential of such methods in providing workable solutions to various inherent problems in research within these domains, including selectivity, objectivity, and replicability, very little empirical work has been done on thematic studies in literature. Such studies are almost entirely undertaken through traditional methods based on individual researchers' reading of texts and intuitive abstraction of generalizations from their reading. This has negative implications in terms of issues of objectivity and replicability. Furthermore, there are challenges in dealing effectively with the hundreds of thousands of new novels that are published every year using traditional methods. In the face of these problems, this study proposes an integrated computational model for the thematic classification of literary texts based on lexical clustering methods. This study is based on a corpus comprising Thomas Hardy's novels and short stories. The study employs computational semantic analysis based on a vector space model (VSM) representation of the lexical content of the texts. The results indicate that the selected texts could be grouped thematically based on their semantic content. Thus, there is now evidence that text clustering approaches, which have long been used in computational theory and data mining applications, can be usefully applied in literary studies.

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“…The size of the angle between the lines that joins vectors to the origin of the space's coordinate system and the lengths of the lines jointly determine the distance between any two vectors in a space [38]. In VSC, for each selected variable, its semantics are used to obtain an interpretation of the domain of interest, the domain thus being measured based on the semantics [39][40][41].…”

A Bibliometric Analysis of Publication on Novel as Literacy Source

“…Based on the co-occurrence analysis above, "literature, novel, translation and identity" are the keywords that appear the most. This clustering also identifies themes in fiction (Omar, 2021). In other words, searching for keywords shows various research themes in literary works.…”

“…In this analysis, there are 30 clusters, namely: Cluster 1 consists of 104 items, Cluster 2 consists of 67 items, Cluster 3 consists of 66 items, Cluster 4 consists of 63 items, Cluster 5 consists of 51 items, Cluster 6 consists of 45 items , Cluster 7 consists of 42 items, Cluster 8 consists of 39 items, Cluster 9 consists of 38 items, Cluster 10 consists of 37 items, Cluster 11 consists of 36 items, Cluster 12 consists of 36 items, Cluster 13 consists of 36 items, Cluster 14 consists of 34 items, Cluster 15 consists of 33 items, Cluster 16 consists of 33 items, Cluster 17 consists of 30 items, Cluster 18 consists of 22 items, Cluster 19 consists of 22 items, Cluster 20 consists of 22 items, Cluster 21 consists of 20 items, Cluster 22 consists of 20 items, Cluster 23 consists of 19 items, Cluster 24 consists of 19 items, Cluster 25 consists of 18 items, Cluster 26 consists of 18 items, Cluster 27 consists of 15 items, Cluster 28 consists of 13 items, Cluster 29 consists of 1 item and Cluster 30 consists of 1 item.Based on the co-occurrence analysis above, "literature, novel, translation and identity" are the keywords that appear the most. This clustering also identifies themes in fiction(Omar, 2021). In other words, searching for keywords shows various research themes in literary works.…”

Conflict and ways of individualising mass images in early Kazakh prose

“…Obviously, the 1920s was the time of the most profound ideological and artistic discoveries of M. Auezov in the field of psychologism, embodied by him in full-fledged artistic images. So, for example, in the 1920s M. Auezov achieves the dialectic of the image and the art of psychological analysis in the novels "Gunshot on the Mountain Pass", "Hard Times", in-depth psychologism in the novel "Beauty in Mourning" (Voronov, 1972;Omar, 2021).…”