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- Berglund, Karl, FD, 1983-, et al.
(författare)
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Apples and Oranges? Large-Scale Thematic Comparisons of Contemporary Swedish Popular and Literary Fiction
- 2019
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Ingår i: Samlaren. - Uppsala : Svenska Litteratursällskapet. - 0348-6133 .- 2002-3871. ; 140, s. 228-260
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Karl Berglund, Department of Literature, Uppsala UniversityMats Dahllöf, Department of Linguistics and Philology, Uppsala UniversityJerry Määttä, Department of Literature, Uppsala UniversityApples and Oranges? Large-Scale Thematic Comparisons of Contemporary Swedish Popular and Literary FictionThe aim of this article is to compare thematic trends in contemporary Swedish bestselling and literary fiction with the help of a computational method—topic modelling—which extracts content themes based on statistical patterns of word usage. This procedure allows us to identify trends and patterns that are not easily discovered through manual reading. We track topics in two subsets of Swedish fiction from the period 2004–2017: 1) prose fiction on the Swedish bestseller charts, and 2) prose fiction shortlisted for the August Prize (arguably the most prestigious Swedish literary prize). The results confirm several assumptions about contemporary popular and literary fiction, such as more plot-focused themes in popular fiction and themes more connected to settings in literary fiction. But the outcomes also provide new, and more surprising knowledge, such as food and economy being the most biased themes among the non-crime fiction bestsellers, whereas themes concerning nature are most biased in the literary realm. Moreover, themes relating to sex, intimacy, and violence are biased towards literary fiction rather than popular fiction. In the light of our findings, we argue that both popular fiction and literary fiction seem to be characterised by certain thematic attributes that make it relevant to discuss them as genres also on a textual-thematic level.
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| 2. |
- Berglund, Karl, Docent, 1983-, et al.
(författare)
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Audiobook stylistics : Comparing print and audio in the bestselling segment
- 2021
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Ingår i: Journal of Cultural Analytics. - : CA: Journal of Cultural Analytics. - 2371-4549. ; 6:3, s. 1-30
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- The paper explores differences between bestsellers in print and the most popular audiobooks ina subscription-based streaming service for books (“beststreamers”) by means of computationalstylistics. The point of departure is the complete set of print bestsellers and digital audiobookbeststreamers for the Swedish book market 2015–2019, in total 172 novels. We probed 34linguistic measures to track differences between subsets at the stylistic level. The results indicatethat there are pronounced differences between the formats. Print bestsellers are longer,syntactically more complex and varied, and seem to focus more on depiction. Beststreamingaudiobooks, by contrast, are shorter, more straightforwardly written, and appear to highlight plotand dialogue. The results are replicated when the comparison is restricted to crime fiction, themost prominent genre in the commercial top segment. Given these results, it is argued that it ispossible to discern a particular audiobook style as one factor affecting book consumption indigital formats, and conversely that the printed format is associated with other stylistic preferences.
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| 3. |
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| 4. |
- Dahllöf, Mats, 1965-
(författare)
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Author gender and text characteristics in contemporary Swedish fiction
- 2024
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Ingår i: Language and Literature. - : Sage Publications. - 0963-9470 .- 1461-7293. ; 33:1, s. 69-100
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- The present study addresses the question of to what extent and how authors’ gender is reflected in the textual properties of bestselling fiction in Swedish during the period 2015–2020. The empirical material was a corpus of 235 female-authored books and 214 male-authored works. The analysis of the texts departed from text property measures targeting grammatical and lexical aspects of language use. Differences between the genders were analysed using the probability of superiority measure in combination with a threshold criterion. The results suggest that authors of bestselling fiction in the Swedish book market to a high degree engage in forms of gender performance when they compose their texts. The differences could in most cases be interpreted as conforming to patterns that have previously been reported for other languages and categories of language use. The gender performance to a large extent agreed with traditional stereotypes about the interests of women and men. There were also differences in grammar-related stylistic preferences. Among the female themes, positive emotion and social interaction were prominent. The male examples include weapons and animosity, as well as numerical quantification. A more grammar-related tendency is that male authors tend to package a larger fraction of their text into noun phrases.
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| 5. |
- Dahllöf, Mats, 1965-
(författare)
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Automatic prediction of gender, political affiliation, and age in Swedish politicians from the wording of their speeches : A comparative study of classifiability
- 2012
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Ingår i: Literary & Linguistic Computing. - Oxford : Oxford University Press (OUP). - 0268-1145 .- 1477-4615. ; 27:2, s. 139-153
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- The present study explores automatic classification of Swedish politicians and their speeches into classes based on personal traits-gender, age, and political affiliation-as a means for measuring and analyzing how these traits influence language use. Support Vector Machines classified 200-word passages, represented by binary bag-of-word-forms vectors. Different feature selections were tried. The performance of the classifiers was assessed using test data from authors unseen in the training data. Author-level predictions derived from twenty-one text-level predictions reached an accuracy rate of 81.2% for gender, 89.4% for political affiliation, and 78.9% for age. Classification concerning each basic distinction was applied to general populations of politicians and to cohorts defined by the other classes. The outcomes suggest that the extent to which these personal traits are expressed in language use varies considerably among the different cohorts and that different traits affect different layers of the vocabulary. The accuracy rates for gender classification were higher for the right wing and older cohorts than for the opposite ones. Age prediction gave higher accuracy for the right wing cohort. Political classification gave the highest accuracy rates when all forms were included in the feature sets, whereas feature sets restricted to verbs or function words gave the highest scores for gender prediction, and the lowest ones for political classification.
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| 6. |
- Dahllöf, Mats, 1965-
(författare)
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Automatic Scribe Attribution for Medieval Manuscripts
- 2018
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Ingår i: Digital Medievalist. - : Open Library of the Humanities. - 1715-0736. ; 11:1, s. 1-26
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- We propose an automatic method for attributing manuscript pages to scribes. The system uses digital images as published by libraries. The attribution process involves extracting from each query page approximately letter-size components. This is done by means of binarization (ink-background separation), connected component labelling, and further segmentation, guided by the estimated typical stroke width. Components are extracted in the same way from the pages of known scribal origin. This allows us to assign a scribe to each query component by means of nearest-neighbour classification. Distance (dissimilarity) between components is modelled by simple features capturing the distribution of ink in the bounding box defined by the component, together with Euclidean distance. The set of component-level scribe attributions, which typically includes hundreds of components for a page, is then used to predict the page scribe by means of a voting procedure. The scribe who receives the largest number of votes from the 120 strongest component attributions is proposed as its scribe. The scribe attribution process allows the argument behind an attribution to be visualized for a human reader. The writing components of the query page are exhibited along with the matching components of the known pages. This report is thus open to inspection and analysis using the methods and intuitions of traditional palaeography. The present system was evaluated on a data set covering 46 medieval scribes, writing in Carolingian minuscule, Bastarda, and a few other scripts. The system achieved a mean top-1 accuracy of 98.3% as regards the first scribe proposed for each page, when the labelled data comprised one randomly selected page from each scribe and nine unseen pages for each scribe were to be attributed in the validation procedure. The experiment was repeated 50 times to even out random variation effects.
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| 9. |
- Dahllöf, Mats, 1965-
(författare)
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Clustering writing components from medieval manuscripts
- 2019
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Ingår i: Proceedings of the Workshop on Computational Methods in the Humanities 2018. ; , s. 23-32
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- This article explores a minimally supervised method for extracting components, mostly letters, from historical manuscripts, and clustering them into classes capturing linguistic equivalence. The clustering uses the DBSCAN algorithm and an additional classification step. This pipeline gives us cheap, but partial, manuscript transcription in combination with human annotation. Experiments with different parameter settings suggest that a system like this should be tuned separately for different categories, rather than rely on one-pass application of algorithms partitioning the same components into non-overlapping clusters. The method could also be used to extract features for manuscript classification, e.g. dating and scribe attribution, as well as to extract data for further palaeographic analysis.
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| 10. |
- Dahllöf, Mats, 1965-
(författare)
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Code and Data for “Classification of Medieval Documents: Determining the Issuer, Place of Issue, and Decade for Old Swedish Charters”
- 2020
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Annan publikationabstract
- Code and data for the article Classification of Medieval Documents: Determining the Issuer, Place of Issue, and Decade for Old Swedish Charters (to appear in DHN2020 Digital Humanities in the Nordic Countries}, Riga, 17--20 March 2020).The study based on this code and dataset is a comparative exploration of different classification tasks for Swedish medieval charters (transcriptions from the SDHK collection) and different classifier setups. In particular, we explore the identification of the issuer, place of issue, and decade of production. The experiments used features based on lowercased words and character 3- and 4-grams. We evaluated the performance of two learning algorithms: linear discriminant analysis and decision trees. For evaluation, five-fold cross-validation was performed. We report accuracy and macro-averaged F1 score. The validation made use of six labeled subsets of SDHK combining the three tasks with Old Swedish and Latin. Issuer identification for the Latin dataset (595 charters from 12 issuers) reached the highest scores, above 0.9, for the decision tree classifier using word features. The best corresponding accuracy for Old Swedish was 0.81. Place and decade identification produced lower performance scores for both languages. Which classifier design is the best one seems to depend on peculiarities of the dataset and the classification task. The present study does however support the idea that text classification is useful also for medieval documents characterized by extreme spelling variation.
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