1999 Fiscal Year Final Research Report Summary
Computer Analysis of Influences between Authors
| Project/Area Number |
09610469
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| Research Category |
Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C)
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| Allocation Type | Single-year Grants |
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| Section | 一般 |
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| Research Field |
英語・英米文学
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| Research Institution | The University of Tokyo |
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Principal Investigator |
YAMAMOTO Shiro Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Language and Information Sciences, The University of Tokyo, Professor, 大学院・総合文化研究科, 教授 (00145765)
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| Project Period (FY) |
1997 – 1999
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| Keywords | Dickens / Carlyle / A Tale of Two Cities / French Revolution / influence / authorship / association of ideas / complex |
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| Research Abstract |
The objective of this study is:
(1) Collection of Electronic texts (including works by Dickens, Carlyle, and other Nineteenth-Century novelists).
(2) Making of a specific-purpose software for data collection.
(3) Study of 'A Tale of Two Cities' (by Dickens) and 'The French Revolution' (by Carlyle) with the use of the aforesaid software.
(4) Application of this method to other writers : a generalization.
(1) A collection of electronic texts has bee made, covering approximately 1000 items. They are still in varied forms, which need further sustained efforts for converting into a form compatible with the processing by the software 'tokei'.
(2) A computer program, named tokei, was written in C, based on SEARCH, a retrieving program written by Yamamoto in previous studies. Tokei retrieves a particular English word (including forms modified by declension and inflection) through a text, and in that process makes a frequency table of words that appear in the contexts surrounding the retrieved instances. The number of words to go before and after the instance can be specified.
(3) Several texts by Dickens and Carlyle ('A Tale of Two Cities', 'The French Revolution', 'Old Curiosity Shop' and 'Sarter Resartus') have been intensively studied with the use of tokei. The purpose of the study was to establish Carlyle-to-Dickens influence in 'A Tale of Two Cities' through the statistically based study of frequency of words appearing in specific contexts. There are some data which do seem to suggest certain relation between those two literary works under study, but concluding evidence has yet to be found in further studies.
(4) Though the specific purpose of this stydy, ie. the establishment of relationship between 'The French Revolution' and 'A Tale of Two Cities' has not been reached in a occlusive form, some possibilities have emerged as consequences of application of tokie to various texts, such as the detection of plagiarism and the establishing of psychological complex in writers.
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