Abstract
This paper describes a corpus of about 3000 English literary texts with about 250 million words extracted from the Gutenberg project that span a range of genres from both fiction and non-fiction written by more than 130 authors (e.g., Darwin, Dickens, Shakespeare). Quantitative Narrative Analysis (QNA) is used to explore a cleaned subcorpus, the Gutenberg English Poetry Corpus (GEPC) which comprises over 100 poetic texts with around 2 million words from about 50 authors (e.g., Keats, Joyce, Wordsworth). Some exemplary QNA studies show author similarities based on latent semantic analysis, significant topics for each author or various text-analytic metrics for George Eliot’s poem ‘How Lisa Loved the King’ and James Joyce’s ’Chamber Music’, concerning e.g. lexical diversity or sentiment analysis. The GEPC is particularly suited for research in Digital Humanities, Natural Language Processing or Neurocognitive Poetics, e.g. as training and test corpus, or for stimulus development and control.
Highlights
In his “The psycho-biology of language,” Zipf (1932) introduced the law of linguistic change claiming that as the frequency of phonemes or of linguistic forms increases, their magnitude decreases
Zipf was a precursor of contemporary natural language processing/NLP (e.g., Natural Language Tool Kit/NLTK; Bird et al, 2009), quantitative narrative analysis (QNA), Computational Linguistics or Digital Humanities, and of Psycholinguistics and Empirical Studies of Literature, since he theorized about “the hearers responses” to literature
Except for the poetry collection subcorpus further explored in this paper and called the Gutenberg English Poetry Corpus (GEPC), these texts are not edited, shortened, or cleaned
Summary
In his “The psycho-biology of language,” Zipf (1932) introduced the law of linguistic change claiming that as the frequency of phonemes or of linguistic forms increases, their magnitude decreases. About 30 years later, when analyzing Baudelaires poem “Les chats,” Jakobson and Lévi-Strauss (1962) counted text features like the number of nasals, dental fricatives, liquid phonemes or adjectives, and homonymic rhymes in different parts of the sonnet (e.g., the first quatrain) to support their qualitative analyses and interpretation of, e.g., oxymora that link stanzas, of the relation between the images of cats and women, or of the poem as an open system which progresses dynamically from the quatrain to the couplet While their systematic structuralist pattern analysis of a poem
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