
Literature by the Numbers - soneca
http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/tip-sheet/article/73072-danielle-steel-loves-the-weather-and-elmore-leonard-hates-exclamation-points-literature-by-the-numbers.html
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igravious
Nice. My field of "digital humanities" gets a mention. I'm performing digital
investigations along these lines except my focus is specifically philosophy
texts. One of the questions I'm attempting to answer along the way is, what
makes a philosophy text philosophical? In addition to statistical analysis I'm
also doing topic modelling. If anybody out there is doing something similar
I'd love to hear from them. :)

~~~
_rpd
> topic modelling

What are you considering using to measure topic similarity?

~~~
igravious
Gensim?

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gkya
This brings to my mind the novel _Se una notte di inverno un viaggiatore_ of
Italo Calvino where there are many references to computers analysing and
writing novel, and also a particular scene (that of Lotaria and Silas Flannery
in a dialogue) where a young researcher,instead of reading the novels, makes a
frequency based index of all the words in a novel and analyses themto find out
what it is about

That aside, as a person who's both a self taught programmer and a humanities
student with literary aspirations, I do wonder how digital technology and text
craftsmanship interacts andcan interact in the future. Certainly a thing worth
a deep research.

