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
Permission of department
Semester Course Offered
Offered every 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 called WordSmith Tools. In addition, students are expected to learn to evaluate the professional literature of text and corpus analysis with respect to their own particular literary or linguistic fields, which in most cases will include evaluation of quantitative approaches. Students must also learn to select and apply appropriate text and corpus analysis methods to problems in their own particular literary or linguistic areas, at a level of sophistication matching the current literature in their fields.
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 the current motivations for and state of both English corpora and analyses of those corpora. The readings for the course can address questions of literary text analysis like author attribution, and the computer methods discussed will be directly applicable to computer analysis of literary texts.
Syllabus