Search

The article is devoted to the stylometric analysis of stories written by Jorge Luis Borges and Adolfo Bioy Casares under the common pseudonym Honorio Bustos Domecq. The work poses two questions: 1) Is Bustos Domecq’s style different from the writing style of Borges and Bioy Casares? 2) What is the share of influence of each of the co-authors on the formation of Bustos Domecq's style? To solve research problems, it is used Delta method, one of the most reliable stylometric tools to date; as well as the support vector machine, a common machine learning method that is used to solve classification problems. It turns out that Bustos Domecq's style differs from the style of the stories of Borges and Bioy Casares. However, in the texts of Bustos Domecq the authorial signal of Bioy Casares predominates, which is revealed on the basis of both stylometric and historical-literary analysis. The influence of Borges is more clearly manifested only in the first stories (1940s), when Bioy Caceres is a literary disciple of Borges, and in the second half of the 1960s, at a time of serious emotional upheavals for Borges, as well as his world recognition. Analysis of the topics of the stories, where Borges's authorial signal predominates, also confirms the results of stylometric experiments: the story “The Long Search for Tai An”, as well as the first texts of the collection The Chronicles of Bustos Domec “Tribute to Cesar Paladion”, “An Evening with Ramon Bonavena” and others really correspond to the poetics of Borges.

The paper deals with the poetics of the novels of the Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa and the evolution of his style. To solve research problems, it is used the Delta method which is the most authoritative and reliable stylometric tool that allows you to compare texts based on the distribution of most frequent words. The work poses three questions: 1) Do Vargas Llosa's early total novels The Time of the Hero, The Green House, and Conversation in the Cathedral differ at the level of style from the later novels, forming a separate group, as the literary hypothesis claims? Answer: the hypothesis is confirmed; 2) Is it possible to divide the fifteen texts of the second period into smaller groups based on stylistic similarities? Answer: novels of the second period are divided into three large groups. Moreover, an interesting correlation is revealed: the novels grouped into separate groups have similarities not only at the level of style, but also at the level of themes, composition and narrative features; 3) Whether the “boom” is a stylistically isolated period in the poetics of its key authors? Answer: the novels written by Latin American authors during the boom period (1960–1970s) are not stylistically isolated: the authorial signal is stronger, and the case of Vargas Llosa with a clear differentiation of groups of novels is unique.

The paper provides the addenda to A. Kompa, Gnesioi filoi: the search for George Syncellus’ and Theophanes the Confessor’s own words, and the authorship of their oeuvre, Studia Ceranea 5, 2015, p. 155–230. All the expressions crucial to the stylistic and stylometric argument on the authorship of the Chronography of Theophanes have been updated after 7 years and verified in the expanded TLG database. The updated results are presented below. The conclusions confirm the previous opinions on the individual, singular authorship of the chronicle of Theophanes with differences in style from the first part of the universal history, written by George Syncellus. At the same time, both works should be treated as a single project, and the prooimion to Theophanes’ part as a sound base faor the reconstruction of the writing process. The clauses ὡς προέφην, καθὼς καὶ προέφην, ὡς προέφημεν, and καθὼς προέφημεν are specific to the Chronography of Theophanes in their frequency and diversity, but they seem to be known and used by the circles from which Theophanes acquired his literary skills.

In audiovisual translation, stylometry can be used to measure formal-aesthetic fidelity. We present a corpus-based measure of syntactic complexity as a feature of language style. The methodology considers hierarchical dimensions of syntactic complexity, using syllable counting and dependency parsing. The test material are dialogues of several characters from the TV show “Two and a Half Men”. The results show that characters do not differ syntactically among themselves as much as might be expected, and that, despite a general tendency to level differences even more in translation, the changes in syntactic complexity between the original and translation depend mostly on the respective character-feature combination.

This article explores by aid of stylometric methods the collaborative authorship of the Vita Hildegardis, Hildegard of Bingen's (auto-?)biography. Both Hildegard and her biographers gradually contributed to the text in the course of the last years of Hildegard's life, and it was posthumously completed in the mid-1180s by end redactor Theoderic of Echternach. In between these termini a quo and ante quem the work was allegedly taken up but left unfinished by secretaries Godfrey of Disibodenberg and Guibert of Gembloux. In light of the fact that the Vita is an indispensable source in gaining historical knowledge on Hildegard's life, the question has often been raised whether the Life of Hildegard is – by dint of contributions by multiple stakeholders – a larger-than-life depiction of the visionary's life course. Specifically the 'autobiographical' passages included in the Vita, in which Hildegard is allegedly cited directly and is taken to recount biographical information in the first-person singular, have been approached with suspicion. By applying state-of-the-art computional methods for the automatic detection of writing style (stylometry), the delicate questions of authenticity and collaborative authorship of this (auto?)hagiographical text are addressed.

The quantitative analysis of writing style (stylometry) is becoming an increasingly common research instrument in philology. When it comes to medieval texts, such a methodology might be able to help us disentangle the multiple authorial strata that can often be discerned in them (issuer, dictator, scribe, etc.). To deliver a proof of concept in 'distant diplomatics,' we have turned to a corpus of twelfth-century Latin charters from the Cambrai episcopal chancery. We subjected this collection to an (unsupervised) stylometric modelling procedure, based on lexical frequency extraction and dimension reduction. In the absence of a sizable 'ground truth' for this material, we zoomed in on a specific case study, namely the oeuvre of the previously identified dictator-scribe known as 'RogF/JeanE.' Our results offer additional support for the attribution of a diplomatic oeuvre to this individual and even allow us to enlarge it with additional documents. Our analysis moreover yielded the serendipitous discovery of another, previously unnoticed, oeuvre, which we tentatively attribute to a scribe-dictator 'JeanB.' We conclude that the large-scale stylometric analysis is a promising methodology for digital diplomatics. More efforts, however, will have to be invested in establishing gold standards for this method to realize its full potential.