Event organised by the Computational Humanities research group
To register to the seminar and obtain the link to the call, please fill in this form.
28 November 2023 – 3pm GMT
King’s College London (in person) and MSTeams (remote)
Jan Rybicki (Jagiellonian University of Kraków, Poland), Experiments with stylometric distant reading too many books, or is there evolution in literature, or what happens to target language in translation, or what is poetry, and many other things
Abstract
If you want to analyse more books than you can read and remember (say, ten thousand and five novels, dramas and poetry collections in a language and/or translated into that language from other languages), you can count various things in their texts (like meaningful words, or, even better, grammatical words) and then try to make some sense out of it all by combining these results with the set’s metadata: author, authorial gender, translator, translatorial gender, source language, year or century and place of publication, and more). The questions that you can answer that way may not be the ones you’ve been taught to ask of literature at school, but at least you may get some answers. To prove this point even more strongly, this presentation will use literature that you’ve probably never read because it’s in a language you don’t even think you could learn (but no worries: this talk will be given in English).
Bio
Jan Rybicki is Associate Professor at the Institute of English Studies at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland, and Director of the Jagiellonian Centre for Digital Humanities there. He specialises in stylometric authorial attribution and distant reading of literature, with particular interest in literary translation, a natural choice when one considers that he has also translated into Polish over 30 novels by such authors as Kingsley Amis, Douglas Coupland, Francis Scott Fitzgerald, William Golding, Nadine Gordimer, Kazuo Ishiguro or Jeanette Winterson, including 10 books by John le Carré.
The video of this seminar is available here.