Intertextual Distance Research Articles

Karachay-Balkarian Novel: Distant Reading Practice

The article for the first time tests some methods of distant reading on the material of KarachayBalkarian novels. The object of the study is the texts of 55 fiction works in the Karachay-Balkar language (mainly novels). Based on the analyzed texts, as well as some related meta-information, conclusions are drawn about the dynamics of publication activity in relation to Karachay-Balkarian novels - in particular, an unprecedented decrease in such activity since 2011 is indicated (only two published novels were found during this period). For the first time, the method Delta for calculation of intertextual distances (together with tree-like clusterization) was applied to the samples of Karachay-Balkarian literature, once again confirming its high efficiency. In addition to the unmistakable attribution of the analyzed texts, the generated tree structure is characterized by the presence of two branches (Karachay and Balkarian), as well as two sub-branches within the Balkarian branch. At the same time, intraBalkarian dialects are not revealed on the tree. The chronological principle has been found: the work located the furthest on the tree from the other works of the same author is always published either earlier than all the others, or later than all the others.

Authorship of Pauline epistles revisited

The name Paul appears in 13 epistles, but is he the real author? According to different biblical scholars, the number of letters really attributed to Paul varies from 4 to 13, with a majority agreeing on seven. This article proposes to revisit this authorship attribution problem by considering two effective methods (Burrows' Delta, Labbé's intertextual distance). Based on these results, a hierarchical clustering is then applied showing that four clusters can be derived, namely: {Colossians‐Ephesians}, {1 and 2 Thessalonians}, {Titus, 1 and 2 Timothy}, and {Romans, Galatians, 1 and 2 Corinthians}. Moreover, a verification method based on the impostors' strategy indicates clearly that the group {Colossians‐Ephesians} is written by the same author who seems not to be Paul. The same conclusion can be found for the cluster {Titus, 1 and 2 Timothy}. The Letter to Philemon stays as a singleton, without any close stylistic relationship with the other epistles. Finally, a group of four letters {Romans, Galatians, 1 and 2 Corinthians} is certainly written by the same author (Paul), but the verification protocol also indicates that 2 Corinthians is related to 1 Thessalonians, rendering a clear and simple interpretation difficult.

Analysis of Intertextual Distances Using Multidimensional Scaling in the Context of Authorship Attribution

Four distance functions were evaluated in order to determine which one better represents two types of style markers (named as static and dynamic) commonly used for authorship attribution tasks. Intertextual distances were analysed from different authors and evaluated if the closest text to another was written by the same author. Classic multidimensional scaling was used to visualize intertextual distances because we consider that this is a method that allows the judges to better understand and visualize the results.The outcome of this paper is that selecting different distance functions considering the type of style marker improves the clustering of texts from the same author. We concluded that while for static features Canberra distance is recomendable, the dynamic features must depend on the style of each author.

Estimating the probability of an authorship attribution

In authorship attribution, various distance‐based metrics have been proposed to determine the most probable author of a disputed text. In this paradigm, a distance is computed between each author profile and the query text. These values are then employed only to rank the possible authors. In this article, we analyze their distribution and show that we can model it as a mixture of 2 Beta distributions. Based on this finding, we demonstrate how we can derive a more accurate probability that the closest author is, in fact, the real author. To evaluate this approach, we have chosen 4 authorship attribution methods (Burrows' Delta, Kullback‐Leibler divergence, Labbé's intertextual distance, and the naïve Bayes). As the first test collection, we have downloaded 224 State of the Union addresses (from 1790 to 2014) delivered by 41 U.S. presidents. The second test collection is formed by the Federalist Papers. The evaluations indicate that the accuracy rate of some authorship decisions can be improved. The suggested method can signal that the proposed assignment should be interpreted as possible, without strong certainty. Being able to quantify the certainty associated with an authorship decision can be a useful component when important decisions must be taken.

Improving Labbé’s Intertextual Distance: Testing a Revised Version on a Large Corpus of Italian Literature

Moving from Labbé’s proposal envisaging the use of intertextual distance to measure the similarity (and dissimilarity) of texts, this paper proposes a new calculation procedure based on repeated observations of intertextual distance between pairs of equal-sized text chunks. The implementation of this procedure on a large corpus including 160 Italian novels provides information on the values produced by measuring intertextual distance in (both lemmatized and non-lemmatized) literary texts written in Italian. In order to show the improvement achieved through this iterative procedure compared to the original version, distance values are assessed in terms of their ability to recognize the author as the factor responsible for text pairing.

Hey, you’re a girl?: Gendered expressions in the popular anime, Cowboy Bebop

The popular anime series, Cowboy Bebop, was originally created and released in Japan in 1998 and later gained an intense overseas following. The show owes its phenomenal international acclaim to successful conventions of hegemonic masculinity represented by the imaginary characters. The social semiotics of desire depicted in Cowboy Bebop cater to a general heterosexual market in which hero and babe characters are represented by archetypes of heterosexual normativity. In this study, the idea of inter-indexicality, or 'the movement between two distinctive indexical systems as a semiotic mode of subject formation' (Inoue 2003: 317), will be employed in the discussion of data derived from the Japanese and American English dubbing of Cowboy Bebop. The analysis will focus on how ideas including heterosexual normativity are reproduced in order to negotiate the intertextual distances that link the charac- ters and audience. Inter-indexical notions help to construct interpretive voices familiar to the cross-cultural audience's social world.

The Federalist Papers revisited: A collaborative attribution scheme

AbstractThis paper presents and evaluates a collaborative attribution strategy based on six authorship attribution schemes representing the two main paradigms used in authorship studies. Based on very frequent words as features, the classical paradigm (or similarity‐based methods) proposes to compute an intertextual distance between the disputed text and the different author profiles (concatenation of their writings). As a second paradigm, we can apply different machine learning schemes such as the naïve Bayes, and the support vector machines (SVM). As an evaluation corpus, we have used The Federalist Papers, a well‐known collection in authorship attribution. During our evaluation, we have tried to follow the recommendations and the best practices known to assess the various attribution schemes. The evaluation shows that, in the two paradigms, we can find effective attribution schemes. But when combining these individual results using a vote aggregation method, the final collaborative decision is always correct and robust. Moreover, to indicate the degree of belief attached to the combined attribution, we can consider the percentage of votes obtained by each possible assignment. When analyzing the output given by the individual attribution schemes, we also found that the provided information is difficult to interpret, at least, for the end‐user.

Mapping a Landscape of Texts

What does ‘mapping’ mean when applied to a large corpus of artistic documents one wishes to examine? How can the methodologies of ‘distant reading’ (Franco Moretti) be applied to contemporary performative writing? In order to translate a corpus of texts into a spatial map, this paper proposes to use tools from computational linguistics and information visualization. For the research project ‘Belgium is Happening’, a large corpus of performative writings from Flemish and Dutch post-war theatre was digitized. These were processed computationally in order to determine their intertextual distances. Next, the set of all document nodes and their intertextual distances was visualized as a series of network graphs. The resulting graphs clearly distinguish authorship clusters. They make clear which authors wrote in a closely related style, and help to identify specific subgenres of experimental writing and style. Such a map literally provides a bird's eye view of the different experimental texts, and it also makes it possible to question existing groupings in literary history using the results of the automatic clustering approach.

SCAT: a system of classification for Arabic texts

The core of this work is to realise a system of classification for Arabic texts (SCAT) based on the inter-textual distance theory for Arabic language. This theory assumes the classification of texts according to criteria of lexical statistics, and it is based on the lexical connection approach. Our objective is to integrate this theory as a tool of classification of texts in Arabic language. It requires the integration of a metrics for the classification of texts using a database of lemmatised and identified corpus which can be considered as a literature reference for times, kinds, literary themes and authors and this in order to permit the classification of anonymous texts.

Anime and intertextualities

Cowboy Bebop, a popular anime series set in the year 2071 onboard the spaceship Bebop, chronicles the bohemian adventures of a group of bounty hunters. This paper presents how the imaginary characters and their voices are conventionalized to fit hegemonic norms. The social semiotic of desire depicted in Cowboy Bebop caters to a general heterosexual market in which hero and babe characters represent the anime archetypes of heterosexual normativity. Scripted speech used in the anime functions as a role language which indexes common ideological attributes associated with a character’s demeanor. This study focuses on how ideas, including heterosexual normativity and culture-specific practices, are reproduced in media texts in order to negotiate the intertextual distances that link the characters and audience.

Regimenting languages on Korean television: subtitles and institutional authority

This article presents an analysis of two different practices of subtitling on Korean television. It claims that these practices constitute different strategies of entextualization that produce authoritative regimentations of languages and discourses through manipulation of the intertextual distance between the original text and its representation. In the first type, impact captioning, or intralanguage subtitles on entertainment shows, different styles of subtitles distinguish the authoritative voice of the institution from the voices of ordinary speakers, allowing the media institution to simultaneously exploit speakers' problematic discourse for humorous purposes and to maintain an official image of neutrality and morality. In the second type, translation subtitling, which translates speech in languages that are assumed to be incomprehensible to viewers, subtitles enable the media institution to position its viewers with respect to linguistic competence, a process that is mediated by the construction of subtitles as neutral representations of spoken discourse. Therefore, in both cases, entextualization of discourse through subtitles must be seen as a strategy for the projection of institutional authority, reflecting metadiscursive interactional work done by the producers of media texts as they engage in acts of regimentation.

Experiments on authorship attribution by intertextual distance in english*

How can it be said that texts are “near to” or “distant from” one another? Are different texts by a single author more similar than texts by different authors? To answer these questions, a method is proposed by calculating intertextual distance. A blind test and some additional experiments show that this calculation offers an interesting tool for non-traditional authorship attribution.

A Tool for Literary Studies: Intertextual Distance and Tree Classification

How to measure proximities and oppositions in large text corpora? Intertextual distance provides a simple and interesting solution. Its properties make it a good tool for text classification, and especially for tree-analysis which is fully presented and discussed here. In order to measure the quality of this classification, two indices are proposed. The method presented provides an accurate tool for literary studies -as is demonstrated by applying it to two areas of French literature, Racine's tragedies and an authorship attribution experiment.

An Application of Authorship Attribution by Intertextual Distance in English

Une application d’attribution d’auteur au moyen de la distance intertextuelle en anglais Le calcul de distance intertextuelle que C. et D. Labbe appliquent aux textes francais peut etre utilise pour differencier les œuvres d’au moins deux auteurs dramatiques contemporains de l’epoque elisabethaine, William Shakespeare et Thomas Middleton. Bien que les 46 textes sous etude, transcrits avec une orthographe moderne, ne soient pas lemmatises et que seuls des echantillons de textes de meme longueur aient ete utilises, les indices de distance intertextuelle qu’on a pu ainsi etablir empiriquement sont du meme ordre de grandeur que ceux qu’ont etablis C. et D. Labbe pour le francais. Timon of Athens considere comme etant pour deux-tiers de Shakespeare et pour un tiers de Middleton se place entre le groupe des œuvres de Shakespeare et celui des œuvres de Middleton dans une analyse multidimensionnelle de 1035 distances intertextuelles.

Intertextual Distances, Three Authors

Using an adaptation of C. and D. Labbe's method of intertextual distances, fourteen short texts by three literary scholars are shown to be distinguishable by author. Of equal interest is the proximity of texts which treat similar themes, or employ similar sub-genres. The interaction of the factors which contribute to intertextual distances enriches the approach and goes some way towards bridging the gap between computational stylistics and traditional literary criticism.

Intertextual Distances Between Shakespeare Plays, With Special Reference to Henry V (Verse)

The method of comparing intertextual distances described by C. and D. Labbé is applied in simplified form to the 36 plays of the Shakespeare First Folio. The resultant configuration by verbal proximity corresponds generally to the plays’ association by chronology and genre. A partition of Henry V, however, into equal parts of prose and verse shows the 11,371 words of the play’s verse to be anomalous with the rest of the Shakespeare texts, and, unusually, with the prose of the same play. This feature reinforces previous doubt cast on the authorial integrity of the play.

Inter-Textual Distance and Authorship Attribution Corneille and Molière

The calculation proposed in this paper measures neighbourhood between several texts. It leads to a normalized metric and a distance scale which can be used for authorship attribution. An experiment is presented on one of the famous cases in French literature: Corneille and Molière. The calculation clearly makes the difference between the two works but it also demonstrates that Corneille contributed to many of Molière’s masterpieces.