stylo (version 0.5.7)

stylo: Stylometric multidimensional analyses

Description

It is quite a long story what this function does. Basically, it is an all-in-one tool for a variety of experiments in computational stylistics. For a more detailed description, refer to HOWTO available at: https://sites.google.com/site/computationalstylistics/

Usage

stylo(gui = TRUE, frequencies = NULL, parsed.corpus = NULL,
      features = NULL, path = NULL, corpus.dir = "corpus", 
      network = FALSE, ...)

Arguments

gui

an optional argument; if switched on, a simple yet effective graphical interface (GUI) will appear. Default value is TRUE.

frequencies

using this optional argument, one can load a custom table containing frequencies/counts for several variables, e.g. most frequent words, across a number of text samples. It can be either an R object (matrix or data frame), or a filename cont

parsed.corpus

another option is to pass a pre-processed corpus as an argument. It is assumed that this object is a list, each element of which is a vector containing one tokenized sample. The example shown below will give you some hints how to prepare such

features

usually, a number of the most frequent features (words, word n-grams, character n-grams) are extracted automatically from the corpus, and they are used as variables for further analysis. However, in some cases it makes sense to use a set of ta

path

if not specified, the current directory will be used for input/output procedures (reading files, outputting the results).

corpus.dir

the subdirectory (within the current working directory) that contains the corpus text files. If not specified, the default subdirectory corpus will be used. This option is immaterial when an external corpus and/or external table

network

an optional argument for producing stylometric bootstrap consensus networks (Eder, forthcoming); the function saves a csv file, containing a list of nodes that can be loaded into, say, Gephi.

...

any variable produced by stylo.default.settings can be set here, in order to overwrite the default values.

Value

• The function returns an object of the class stylo.results: a list of variables, including a table of word frequencies, vector of features used, a distance table and some more stuff. Additionally, depending on which options have been chosen, the function produces a number of files containing results, plots, tables of distances, etc.

Details

If no additional argument is passed, then the functions tries to load text files from the default subdirectory corpus. There are a lot of additional options that should be passed to this function; they are all loaded when stylo.default.settings is executed (which is typically called automatically from inside the stylo function).

References

Eder, M. Kestemont, M. and Rybicki, J. (2013). Stylometry with R: a suite of tools. In: "Digital Humanities 2013: Conference Abstracts". University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Lincoln, NE, pp. 487-89. Eder, M. (forthcoming). Visualization in stylometry: some problems and solutions.

See Also

classify, oppose, rolling.delta

Examples

# standard usage (it builds a corpus from a set of text files):
stylo()

# loading word frequencies from a tab-delimited file:
stylo(frequencies = "my_frequencies.txt")

# using an existing corpus (a list containing tokenized texts):
txt1 = c("to", "be", "or", "not", "to", "be")
txt2 = c("now", "i", "am", "alone", "o", "what", "a", "slave", "am", "i")
txt3 = c("though", "this", "be", "madness", "yet", "there", "is", "method")
custom.txt.collection = list(txt1, txt2, txt3)
  names(custom.txt.collection) = c("hamlet_A", "hamlet_B", "polonius_A")
stylo(parsed.corpus = custom.txt.collection)

# using a custom set of features (words, n-grams) to be analyzed:
my.selection.of.function.words = c("the", "and", "of", "in", "if", "into", 
                                   "within", "on", "upon", "since")
stylo(features = my.selection.of.function.words)

# loading a custom set of features (words, n-grams) from a file:
stylo(features = "wordlist.txt")

# batch mode, custom name of corpus directory:
my.test = stylo(gui = FALSE, corpus.dir = "ShakespeareCanon")
summary(my.test)

# batch mode, character 3-grams requested:
stylo(gui = FALSE, analyzed.features = "c", ngram.size = 3)