stylo (version 0.5.2)

oppose: Contrastive analysis of texts

Description

Function that performs a contrastive analysis between two given sets of texts. It generates a list of words significantly preferred by a tested author (or, a collection of authors), and another list containing the words significantly avoided by the former when compared to another set of texts. Some visualizations are available.

Usage

oppose(gui = TRUE, path = "", primary.corpus.dir = "primary_set",
secondary.corpus.dir = "secondary_set", test.corpus.dir = "test_set")

Arguments

gui

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

path

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

primary.corpus.dir

the subdirectory (within the current working directory) that contains one or more texts to be compared to a comparison corpus. These texts can e.g. be the oeuvre by author A (to be compared to the oeuvre of another author B) or a collection of texts b

secondary.corpus.dir

the subdirectory (within the current working directory) that contains a comparison corpus: a pool of texts to be contrasted with texts from the primary.corpus. If not specified, the default subdirectory secondary_set

test.corpus.dir

the subdirectory (within the current working directory) that contains texts to verify the discriminatory strength of the features extracted from the primary.set and secondary.sets. Ideally, the test.corpus.dir

Value

• The function returns a list of variables, including a list of words significantly preferred in the primary set, words significantly avoided (or, preferred in the secondary set), and possibly some other results, if applicable.

Details

This function performs a contrastive analysis between two given sets of texts, using Burrows's Zeta (2007) in its different flavors, including Craig's extensions (Craig and Kinney, 2009). Also, the Whitney-Wilcoxon procedure as introduced by Kilgariff (2001) is available. The function generates a vector of words significantly preferred by a tested author, and another vector containing the words significantly avoided.

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.

Burrows, J. F. (2007). All the way through: testing for authorship in different frequency strata. "Literary and Linguistic Computing", 22(1): 27-48.

Craig, H. and Kinney, A. F., eds. (2009). Shakespeare, Computers, and the Mystery of Authorship. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Hoover, D. (2010). Teasing out authorship and style with t-tests and Zeta. In: "Digital Humanities 2010: Conference Abstracts". King's College London, pp. 168-170.

Kilgariff A. (2001). Comparing Corpora. "International Journal of Corpus Linguistics" 6(1): 1-37.

See Also

stylo, classify, rolling.delta

Examples

# standard usage:
oppose()

# batch mode, custom name of corpus directories:
oppose(gui = FALSE, primary.corpus.dir = "ShakespeareCanon",
       secondary.corpus.dir = "MarloweSamples")