General information

Key data

  • Dates: from Wednesday, 5 December (all day) to Friday, 7 December, 2018 (until 3:00 pm)
  • Location: National University of Ireland, Galway
  • Workshops: Two parallel workshops
  • Workshop coordinators: Mike Kestemont (workshop 1) and Antonija Primorac (antonija.primorac[at]uniri.hr), workshop 2
  • Call for applications: See information on the call here

Registration

  • Registration for the Training School is through the COST Action only, not through the EADH conference.
  • The call for applications for registration in the workshops as well as for supporting grants has been closed on October 31st.
  • Workshop 1 is fully booked at this time, we can only add prospective participants to our waiting list. Please contact the workshop’s coordinator if you would like to be added to the waiting list. For Worshop 2, there are still some spots available, so please get in touch with that workshop’s coordinator soon to secure a place!

Programme

The programme will consist of two parallel workshops. Each participant is required to choose one workshop.

  • Workshop 1: Methods and Tools of Distant Reading Adapted to Multiple European Languages
  • Workshop 2: Theoretical Concepts and their Confrontation with Computational Method

Workshop 1: Methods and Tools of Distant Reading Adapted to Multiple European Languages

Schedule

Wednesday, 5 December 2018:  “Corpus management and analysis with TXM”, taught by Serge Heiden (École normale supérieure de Lyon, France)

08:30-9:00 Installation fix session (for software needed at either of 3 workshop days)

09:00-09:30 Welcome (for both Training School workshops)

09:30-10:30 Corpus management and analysis with TXM 1

10:30-11:00 Coffee break

11:00-12:30 Corpus management and analysis with TXM 2

12:30-13:30 Lunch break

13:30-15:45 Corpus management and analysis with TXM 3

15:45-16:15 Coffee break

16:15-17:30 Lecture for participants of both Training School workshops by Professor Christof Schöch (Trier University, Germany)

Thursday, 6 December 2018: “Distributional Semantics + Network Analysis”, taught by Steffen Pielström (Würzburg University, Germany) and Meliha Handzic (International Burch University, Bosnia and Herzegovina)

09:00-10:30 Topic Modeling 1 (Steffen Pielström)

10:30-11:00 Coffee break

11:00-12:30 Topic Modeling 2 (Steffen Pielström)

12:30-13:30 Lunch break

13:30-15:00 Using tools (Palladio) for network analysis (Meliha Handzic)

15:00-15:30 Coffee break

15:30-17:00 Using tools (Gephi) for network analysis (Meliha Handzic)

Friday, 7 December 2018: “Stylometry with R”, taught by Joanna Byszuk (Polish Academy of Sciences, Poland)

09:00-10:30 Getting started with stylometry

10:30-11:00 Coffee break

11:00-12:30 Stylometry for literary explorations

12:30-13:30 Lunch break

13:30-15:00 Authorship attribution

15:00 Closing (for both Training School workshops)

Description

The aims of the Methods and Tools of Distant Reading Adapted to Multiple European Languages workshop are twofold: First and foremost, it will provide participants with a gentle introduction to several widely-used tools and methods for distant reading research. At the same time, it aims to specifically enable participants to successfully adapt these tools and methods to texts in a wide variety of European languages, especially lesser-resourced ones.

In each of the three sessions, the first step will be to introduce participants to one specific tool serving a specific analytic purpose. In a second step, each session will provide participants with concrete examples of how to apply such methods to literary texts in a variety of European languages other than English. Among these languages, there will be relatively well-resourced ones as well as less-resourced languages.

Participants will be provided with corpora in a variety of languages and are invited to bring corpora in additional languages. Issues that will be treated here include differences in linguistic preprocessing (e.g. varying tokenization strategies, varying part-of-speech tagsets, language-specific lists of stopwords) as well as differences in tool parameters (e.g. use of lemmatized text for Topic Modeling in highly-inflected languages), but also strategies to avoid the need to rely on language-dependent resources (e.g. filtering words based on frequency rather than based on part-of-speech).

 

Workshop 2, Theoretical Concepts and their Confrontation with Computational Method 

Schedule

Wednesday, 5 December 2018:  “The notion of style from an established and a computational perspective”, taught by Prof. Dr. Christof Schöch (Trier University, Germany) – room AC204

09:00-09:30 Welcome (for both Training School workshops)

09:30-10:30 Session 1

10:30-11:00   Coffee break

11:00-12:30 Session 2

12:30-13:30 Lunch break

13:30-15:45 Session 3

15:45-16:15 Coffee break

16:15-17:30 Lecture for participants of both Training School workshops by Professor Christof Schöch (Trier University, Germany) (room AC202)

 

Thursday, 6 December 2018: “Definitions of the novel across Europe”, taught by Professor Gerardine Meaney (UCD, Ireland) – room AC204

11-12:30 Session 1

12:30-13:30 Lunch break

13:30-15 Session 2

15-15:30 Coffee break

15:30-17 Session 3

 

Friday, 7 December 2018: “Authorship in the European novel”, taught by Prof. Dr. Fotis Jannidis (Würzburg University, Germany) – room AC204
09-10:30, Session 1

10:30-11 Coffee break

11-12:30 Session 2

12:30-13:30 Lunch break

13:30-15 Session 3

 

Description

Theoretical Concepts and their Confrontation with Computational Method workshop will facilitate a discussion of three closely-related key concepts from literary theory and history with a particular focus on how their meaning and role is affected by the application of recent computational methods of text analysis: the “novel” as a transnational, European genre; the notion of “authorship” as it has been revived in authorship attribution studies; and the notion of “style” in a tension between a subjective judgement of a work’s individuality and the statistical approach to formal features of texts. The aim is to discuss and analyse the differences and similarities in definitions of the novel, authorship, and style across different European literary traditions; to analyse current theoretical perspectives on these notions and their relevance to computational research methods; and to examine how their use, meaning and role differs in computational versus non-computational contexts.

Day 1.
The notion of style from an established and a computational perspective (by Christof Schöch)
This session will focus on the notion of style in established as well as in computational approaches to literary texts. Issues to be debated include key elements of “style” in traditional research (e.g. style as deviation from a norm, as aesthetic experience); the effect of formalization and quantification on what is and is not deemed relevant stylistic information.

Lecture on style (by Professor Christof Schöch) bringing together both participants of the Theory workshop and the parallel workshop on Methods and Tools and wrapping up the discussions of Day 1, tying them to the topic of Day 2.

Day 2.
Definitions of the novel across Europe (by Professor Gerardine Meaney)
This session requires that participants prepare definitions of the novel from their own literary tradition, translated into English, and send them prior to the workshop so that they could be pre-circulated. The aim is to share and discuss these definitions, to comment on the overlaps, similarities and differences. The discussion will also tackle relevant issues such as the average novel length and variations thereof; circulation and the means of assessing it (publication and dissemination via periodicals, single volume, multiple volumes, & the role of libraries). The intention is to come up with tentative conclusions about the shared aspects of the novel as a genre and possible influences on the national definitions (via translation, interaction, or circulation, thanks to geographical or linguistic proximity).

Day 3. Authorship in the European novel (by Professor Fotis Jannidis)
This session will discuss widely-received authorship theories that question the validity of the traditional concept of the author as the guarantee of a unified work (e.g. Barthes, Foucault), and confront them with recent work in computational authorship attribution that shows how strongly visible authorship is when analysing literary texts. The session will also relate these issues to debates in world literature and to possible critiques regarding the notion of literary centres or schools and the notions of influence, canonicity, dissemination and intertextuality. The participants will be expected to prepare by reading assigned texts, to share their observations, especially those critiques that derive from their respective national literary traditions. This day will include a concluding session highlighting parallels and differences between the ‘fate’ of the three previously debated notions of the novel, of authorship and of style.