Ernestine Lahey
Utrecht University
Fellowship project title: Stylistics with R
The goal: The goal of our project is to deliver a two-day workshop for researchers in stylistics in using the statistical programming language R in their research. Stylistics is the study of literary texts from a linguistic perspective. It involves applying what is known about language to an analysis of literature, and drawing conclusions about how the language used in literary texts helps to generate particular meanings and interpretations.
The why: At present, stylisticians who work with digital texts (or “corpora”) tend to rely on “out-of-the-box” computer software, despite the comparative flexibility offered by programming languages like R. However, because using R requires coding, the learning curve for new users is very high. We aim to provide redress by training a group of +/-25 scholars in stylistics in the basics of R for text retrieval and analysis.
