What Can Stylometry Learn From Its Application to Middle Dutch Literature?

Authors

  • Mike Kestemont

Keywords:

Middle Dutch literature, Stylometry, Authorship attribution, Stylistics, Digital Humanities

Abstract

‘Stylometry’ is a rapidly evolving subdiscipline of computational philology, focusing on the quantitative study of (literary) style. In recent years, stylometry has had some interesting applications in the field of Middle Dutch studies, especially in the domain of authorship attribution and scribe identification. In this paper I will highlight and discuss the main insights gained in these contributions. It will appear that these studies raise some challenging issues that deserve stylometry’s careful consideration in coming years.

Author Biography

Mike Kestemont

Mike Kestemont (1985) is a predoctoral researcher with the Research Foundation of Flanders (FWO) at the University of Antwerp, supervised by Frank Willaert and Walter Daelemans. He is currently working on an interdisciplinary project that explores the application of quantitative methods from stylometry to authorship attribution in medieval texts. He focuses on rhyme words in Middle Dutch epic literature. His other fields of interest include oral-formulaic literature and computational linguistics, in particular the problem of spelling variation.

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Published

2011-12-01

How to Cite

Kestemont, M. (2011). What Can Stylometry Learn From Its Application to Middle Dutch Literature?. Journal of Dutch Literature, 2(2). Retrieved from https://www.journalofdutchliterature.org/index.php/jdl/article/view/21

Issue

Vol. 2 No. 2 (2011)

Section

Articles

License

Copyright (c) 2015 Journal of Dutch Literature

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