Names in novels: An experiment in computational stylistics

Abstract

-Proper names in literary texts have different functions. The most important one in real life, identification, is only one of these. Some others are to make the fiction more 'real' or to present ideas about a character by using a name with certain meanings or associations to manipulate the reader's expectations. A description of the functions of a certain name in a certain text becomes relevant when the researcher can point out how it compares to the functions of other names and names in other texts. The paper describes how research into names in literary texts needs a quantitative approach to reach a higher level of relevancy. To get a first impression of what may be normal in literary texts, a corpus of 22 Dutch and 22 English novels and 10 translations into the other language in both sets was gathered. The occurrences of all names in these novels have been tagged for those data categories that seemed useful for the literary stylistic research planned. Some first results of the statistics are presented and the use of the approach is illustrated by means of an analysis of the use of geographical names in the Dutch novel Boven is het stil by Gerbrand Bakker and its English translation by David Colmer, The Twin. In the evaluation of the results, special attention is paid to the status of currently available digital tools for named entity recognition and classification, followed by a wish-list for the tools that this kind of research really needs.2

Beyond the Book: Linking Books to Wikipedia

“…In these experiments, a selected set of books (three novels and one non-fiction title) originally written in Dutch are anal- The importance of names has previously been established in a pilot project [3] that lead to the project Namescape [13]. We build on top of this work and use the Named Entities (NEs) identified in that project in our analysis.…”

“…The starting point of this work is the assumption that Named Entities are relevant to understanding the cultural context of a book [3]: the names of individuals (e.g. historical figures or local cultural icons) may be meaningful in one culture but may bear little relevance in another.…”

“…Other useful resources which provide information on book translations are OCLC WorldCat, 1 LibraryThing, 2 and GoodReads. 3 These sources provide information on the various editions of a book, such as language and date of publication, but also provide more subjective data such as reader reviews and popularity scores. This type of information provides an additional source of information which could enable researchers to learn more about the book and its acceptance in various reader circles.…”

Mapping Digital Discourses of the Capital Region of Finland

“…Meanwhile, in literary onomastics, researchers have increasingly compiled their material from digitalized versions of literary works. These studies have considered, for instance, the uses and functions of proper names in translated novels (see, e.g., Dalen-Oskam 2013;Tuñón 2013).…”

Is badfiction processed differently by the human brain? An electrophysical study on reading experience

“…Although nobody has ever been convinced of a novel's beauty by aesthetic reasoning (Kant, 2007), what we like and dislike reveals deep cultural patterns that might even be embodied in the brain (Berridge and Kringelbach, 2015;Morales and Berridge, 2020). A recent large-scale study in computational literary studies tried to identify textual features responsible for literary quality and found readers' judgment to be deeply biased instead (van Dalen-Oskam, 2023). Except for certain periods, such as Victorianism in the Anglophone and Goethezeit in Germanophone literary history, there is almost no evidence that the processes of agreement on what is good and worth becoming cultural heritage, known as canonization, can be predicted from the very structure of literary works (Brottrager et al, 2021).…”