Masters’ School Seminar 09.06.2021 3 p.m.

The next Masters’ School Seminar will be held on June 9, 3 p.m.

Our guest is professor Maciej Eder, Director of the Institute of Polish Language at the Polish Academy of Sciences, and an Associate Professor at the Pedagogical University of Kraków. He runs the Institute of the Polish Language (Polish Academy of Sciences), chairs the Committee of Linguistics at the Polish Academy of Sciences, vice-chairs the COST Action “Distant Reading”. He is also a part of the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations and supports the Computational Stylistics Group.

Professor Maciej Eder’s background is early modern literature (Polish and Latin), but his main field is computer-assisted text analysis, Digital Humanities and computational stylistics.

The subject of the lecture: Computer-assisted text analysis: from authorship attribution to distant reading

Abstract: In this talk, I will give an introduction to stylometry, or detecting minor stylistic nuances between authors, genres, and literary epochs. Counterintuitively, the best style-markers are usually the words we pay no attention to, such as particles, prepositions, articles, and conjunctions. The frequencies of these and similar function words are counted and then analysed using machine-learning (statistical) methods. I will introduce a few examples of using stylometry to assess the authorship of anonymous texts, and then I will discuss broader applications of stylometric methodology beyond attribution.

More information on the scientific activity and research conducted by Professor Maciej Eder available here: LINK