Course Description
Use of computers to analyze the style and language of particular texts and large collections of text. Areas for study include aspects of electronic texts in the humanities such as text encoding, file manipulation, stylometry, and textual criticism, and aspects of language such as lexical semantics, collocations, and grammar.
Athena Title
TEXT CORP ANALYSIS
Prerequisite
LING 2100 or ENGL(LING) 3030 or CMLT 2111 or CMLT 2210 or CMLT 2212 or CMLT 2220 or CMLT 2500 or ENGL 2310 or ENGL 2320 or ENGL 2330 or ENGL 2340 or ENGL 2400
Semester Course Offered
Offered every even-numbered year.
Grading System
A - F (Traditional)
Course Objectives
Students will become familiar with computer manipulation of texts through a survey of electronic texts in the humanities. Readings and discussion will be supplemented with hands-on computer work with texts and corpora. Students are expected to learn terms, concepts, and techniques used for work with computer manipulation of texts. Students are also expected to learn and use a text processing program such as WordSmith Tools.
Topical Outline
This course is an exploration of text and corpus analysis. As the field is new and developing quickly, topical material is subject to change. A typical course may begin with a survey of electronic texts in the humanities, including elementary notions of text encoding, file manipulation, stylometry, and textual criticism. It may then consider the position of corpus linguistics with respect to other methods of empirical linguistics and to modern theoretical linguistics, and then investigate current motivations for and state of both English corpora and analyses of those corpora. Readings could address questions of literary text analysis (i.e., author attribution). Specific topics vary by instructor and at different times. Periodically during the semester, students will perform a number of graded tasks, including some combination of tests, computer tasks, and out-of-class papers. In-class exams and the final exam will require essays as well as objective questions and problems. Substantial out-of-class writing will be required, including at least one short paper (c. 5 pages), and a prospectus (c. 3-5 pages) that proposes an idea for a major paper due at the end of the term (c. 20 pages).
Syllabus