BIROn - Birkbeck Institutional Research Online

    Close Reading with Computers: Genre Signals, Parts of Speech, and David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas

    Eve, Martin Paul (2017) Close Reading with Computers: Genre Signals, Parts of Speech, and David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas. SubStance 46 (3), pp. 76-104. ISSN 0049-2426.

    [img]
    Preview
    Text
    76.full.pdf - Published Version of Record
    Available under License Creative Commons Attribution No Derivatives.

    Download (765kB) | Preview

    Abstract

    David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas (2004) contains six different generic registers. This article is the first to explore computationally the linguistic mechanisms that create these genre effects. Authorship attribution techniques incorrectly cluster the chapters of Cloud Atlas as distinct ‘authors’ using anything above the nineteen most-common words. This has implications for understandings of literary style and authorship. The seafaring parts of Mitchell’s novel, however, do not correlate with the writings of Herman Melville using Burrows’s delta method. Part-of-speech trigram visualization and analysis reveals the unique present-tense linguistic phrasings (NNP NNP VBZ and NNP VBZ DT) that lend pace to the Luisa Rey section of the novel.

    Metadata

    Item Type: Article
    School: Birkbeck Faculties and Schools > Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences > School of Creative Arts, Culture and Communication
    Depositing User: Martin Eve
    Date Deposited: 21 Jul 2017 21:07
    Last Modified: 09 Aug 2023 12:42
    URI: https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/19237

    Statistics

    Activity Overview
    6 month trend
    958Downloads
    6 month trend
    429Hits

    Additional statistics are available via IRStats2.

    Archive Staff Only (login required)

    Edit/View Item
    Edit/View Item