mauve

Tue Mar 21 11:36:49 CDT 2017

IPW 2017:

'Maybe, but its codes all it is': Thomas Pynchon, Cow Country, and
Computational Stylometry

Martin Eve 

Scheduled in the Hôtel Fleuriau: Tuesday 6 June, from 16:45 to 17:15

Abstract:

In mid-2015, Art Winslow caused something on an online furore when he
suggested that the pseudonymously-authored novel by Adrian Jones Pearson,
Cow Country, was, in fact, a work by Thomas Pynchon. A full-blown argument
then erupted when this was countered by Nate Jones and Pynchon's own
publisher. Indeed, Penguin thundered: [w]e are Thomas Pynchon's publisher
and this is not a book by Thomas Pynchon.

While the great and the good of the contemporary republic of letters argued
over authorship, however, a range of stylometric techniques exist that could
assist in the debate. As the name implies, computational stylometry is the
measurement (metry) of stylistic properties of texts (stylo) using
computers. Stylometry, as a quantifying activity, has a long and varied
history, from legal court cases where the accused was acquitted on the basis
of stylometric evidence, to literary authorship attribution. In the latter
case, as charted by Anthony Kenny, the discipline dates back to
approximately 1851 when Augustus de Morgan suggested that a dispute over the
attribution of certain epistles could be settled by measuring average word
lengths and correlating them with known writings of St Paul. At the time of
writing, according to Ariel Stolerman, computational forensic stylometry
can identify individuals in sets of 50 authors with better than 90%
accuracy, and [can] even scaled to more than 100,000 authors.

In this paper, I give a humanistic/critical background to stylometry and its
important limitations before applying a range of stylometric techniques to
the novels of Thomas Pynchon alongside that of Pearson. In particular, I
examine the widely used unsupervised Burrows's delta algorithm of
most-frequent-word comparisons as well as a part-of-speech frequency
comparison using the Stanford PoS tagger.

At the close of the paper, I will give the results of my computational
experiments, while still noting that we are far from having a perfect system
for attribution. After all, literary forensics are almost always a
post-facto attempt at attributing meaning, even in the anti-intentionalist
schools. In this case, though, it may transpire that I have an answer
(maybe). But as Pynchon puts it in Bleeding Edge: its codes all it is,
for sure.

From: owner-pynchon-l at waste.org [mailto:owner-pynchon-l at waste.org] On Behalf
Of Kai Frederik Lorentzen
Sent: dinsdag 21 maart 2017 11:55
To: Jochen Stremmel <jstremmel at gmail.com>; John Bailey <sundayjb at gmail.com>
Cc: pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Subject: Re: mauve

Well, Robert Musil opens his opus magnum with weather ("Über dem Atlantik
befand sich ein barometrisches Minimum ..."), and Uwe Johnson ("Lange Wellen
treiben schräg gegen den Strand ...") too! That you cannot do that in
literary art is a commonplace and as such wrong.

There's also an academic approach called Digital Humanities (and in this
context the "somewhat arbitrarily chosen" lists are an issue that they at
least try to deal with in a methodological way). Here's an example from the
Stanford Literary Lab: 

Between Canon and Corpus: 
Six Perspectives on 20th-Century Novels

Mark Algee-Hewitt/Mark McGurl

https://litlab.stanford.edu/LiteraryLabPamphlet8.pdf

With (a little) Pynchon content.

Am 21.03.2017 um 11:00 schrieb Jochen Stremmel:

For me the biggest surprise was that Elmore Leonard actually opened two
books with weather! Must have been early ones, Westerns I presume. Will look
it up the next time I raise from my desk.

2017-03-21 10:57 GMT+01:00 John Bailey <sundayjb at gmail.com
<mailto:sundayjb at gmail.com> >:

Haven't read it but have read a bunch of stories about it. The author
probably knew that a book applying data journalism to literature would get
lots of press. The "somewhat arbitrarily" chosen list of 50 authors is a
shortcoming, and it would be much more interesting if he'd sorted 500+
writers, since data journalism with a sample size of 50 is kind of not
really data journalism.

But the conclusions he comes to aren't as offensive as I expected and you
can take them or leave them as you see fit. The observation that 45 percent
of Danielle Steele's first sentences involve the weather - that's fun. And
James Patterson's astonishing use of cliche - I know for a fact that
Patterson just plots his books and farms the actual writing out to
ghostwriters, so that's no surprise.

On Tue, Mar 21, 2017 at 8:29 PM, Jochen Stremmel <jstremmel at gmail.com
<mailto:jstremmel at gmail.com> > wrote:

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/one-writer-used-statistics-reveal
-secrets-what-makes-great-writing-180962515/

Has anybody of you read this book? 

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