We give notice of the on-line workshop Sentiment Analysis in Literary studies organized by the Centre for Information Modelling of the University of Graz.
Sentiment analysis is a common task in literary studies, yet sitting outside the mainstream of analytic computational procedures applied to philosophical corpora. Critic facets of sentiment analysis procedures for historical-philosophical analysis lie primarily on tools’ dictionary-dependancy, from which follow difficulties in obtaining in-depth historical understanding and the possibility of arbitrary biases in interpretation of both the retrieved sentiment and its object. However, reasons for such a sidelining hold when they are referred to techniques and workflows commonly deployed and followed in order to achieve sentiment analysis, while wanting to perform such a task might not be a radically flawed endeavour per se, as long as researchers set a well-grounded research framework.
The workshop’s programme anticipates a thorough examination of existing tools, approaches and workflows as well as of preliminary steps such as textual preprocessing, and it is uncommonly devoted to the analysis of 18th century texts.
The workshop fills in the context of the project “DiSpecs – Distant Spectators. Distant Reading for Periodicals of the Enlightenment”, funded by CLARIAH-AT and in cooperation with the Institute for Interactive Systems and Data Science, the Know-Center GmbH Graz and the Centre for Information Modelling – Austrian Centre for Digital Humanities (ZIM-ACDH) and the Institute for Romance Studies. The project aims to investigate the digitized, TEI encoded and semantically enriched texts of The Spectators (http://gams.uni-graz.at/mws), with quantitative methods of data analysis referred to as distant reading and macroanalysis (topic modeling, stylometry, meme diffusion, sentiment analysis and community detection).
The 18th-century journalistic genre of “spectators” (or moralistic sheets) had a large audience of urban readers and played an essential role in public opinion genesis. This project endeavours to create an integral database for all the moralistic press in French, Italian, Spanish, English, German, and Portuguese. In this context, the Spectator discourses’ quantitative analysis aims to enhance and improve micro-narration studies regarding the repetition of motifs throughout different journals.
Official information is reported below.
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