Performing Gender: Automatic Stylistic Analysis of Shakespeare's Characters
Sobhan Raj Hota, Shlomo Argamon, Moshe Koppel, Iris Zigdon · Touro Scholar (Touro College) · 2006
Since these texts were considered sentimental, most chapters were scored in the medium or high range, so the categories were changed to “highly sentimental” and “not highly sentimental.” With D2K, the Naive Bayes method was used to extract features from these texts, which we might call markers of sentimentality. Looking at the top 100 of these features, some interesting patterns have emerged, including the privileging of proper names of minor characters in chapters that ranked as highly sentimental. Also interesting are blocks of markers that appear equally prevalent, or equally sentimental, we might say: numbers 70-74 are “wet,” lamentations,” “cheerfulness,” “slave-trade,” and “author.” The line of critical argument that goes that the sentimental works focus on motherhood is borne out by “mother” at number 16 and “father” not in the top 100. As we move into the next three phases of the project, we will include stemming as an area of interest in classifying the results. Phase two will use two more novels by the same authors as those in the training set; phrase three may include ephemera, broadsides, and other materials collected in the EAF collection at the UVa Etext Center. Phase four will run the software on texts considered nonsentimental in the nineteenth century and other phases might include twentieth and twenty-first century novels that are or are not considered sentimental. We hope to discover markers that can identify elements of the sentimental in any text.