DIGITAL HUMANITIES 2006 conventions is exhibited: a character nears death and expires in a room usually full of flowers and mourners who often “swoon.” The training set for this experiment includes two other texts that were scored on the same sentimentality scale, Susanna Rowson’s 1794 novel Charlotte: A Tale of Truth and Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Since these texts were considered sentimental, most chapters were scored in the medium or high range, so the categories were changed to “highly sentimental” and “not highly sentimental.” With D2K, the Naive Bayes method was used to extract features from these texts, which we might call markers of sentimentality. Looking at the top 100 of these features, some interesting patterns have emerged, including the privileging of proper names of minor characters in chapters that ranked as highly sentimental. Also interesting are blocks of markers that appear equally prevalent, or equally sentimental, we might say: numbers 70-74 are “wet,” lamentations,” “cheerfulness,” “slave-trade,” and “author.” The line of critical argument that goes that the sentimental works focus on motherhood is borne out by “mother” at number 16 and “father” not in the top 100. As we move into the next three phases of the project, we will include stemming as an area of interest in classifying the results. Phase two will use two more novels by the same authors as those in the training set; phrase three may include ephemera, broadsides, and other materials collected in the EAF collection at the UVa Etext Center. Phase four will run the software on texts considered nonsentimental in the nineteenth century and other phases might include twentieth and twenty-first century novels that are or are not considered sentimental. We hope to discover markers that can identify elements of the sentimental in any text.
Department of Computer Science, Illinois Institute of Technology
Department of Computer Science, Bar-Ilan University
1. Introduction
A
recent development in the study of language and gender is the use of automated text classification methods to examine how men and women might use language differently. Such work on classifying texts by gender has achieved accuracy rates of 70-80% for texts of different types (e-mail, novels, non-fiction articles), indicating that noticeable differences exist (de Vel et al. 2002; Argamon et al. 2003). More to the point, though, is the fact that the distinguishing language features that emerge from these studies are consistent, both with each other, as well as with other studies on language and gender. De Vel et al. (2002) point out that men prefer ‘report talk’, which signifies more independence and proactivity, while women tend to prefer ‘rapport talk’ which means agreeing, understanding and supporting attitudes in situations. Work on more formal texts from the British National Corpus (Argamon et al. 03) similarly shows that the male indicators are mainly noun specifiers (determiners, numbers, adjectives, prepositions, and post-modifiers) indicating an ‘informational style’, while female indicators are a variety of features indicating an ‘involved’ style (explicit negation, first- and second-person pronouns, present tense verbs, and the prepositions “for” and “with”). Our goal is to extend this research for analyzing the relation of language use and gender for literary characters. To the best of our knowledge, there has been little work on understanding how novelists and playwrights
P. 82 Single Sessions
DH.indb 82
6/06/06 10:55:29
DIGITAL HUMANITIES 2006 portray (if they do) differential language use by literary characters of different genders. To apply automated analysis techniques, we need a clean separation of the speech of different characters in a literary work. In novels, such speech is integrated
Related Documents: Gender: Gender and Features Essay
the theme and context, audience, purpose as well as certain formal and stylistic features. The first extract is a cartoon strip written in 1986 by Cathy Guisewite. The cartoon features four panels with three female characters with narrations and speech bubbles to emphasize dialogue and the message regarding women’s rights and sex stereotyping. The context of the cartoon is to show the inequalities between genders. This is evident, when the women begin to associate boys with certain stereotypes…
The study between language and gender caused many debates and research. Linguists argue that the differences are universal, inherent, biologically determined or even leaned behaviourists. Lakoff’s interest in the features and characteristics of men and women’s language made her look into the social implications of speech in her book. In this she analysed and explained the variation of speech and gender, in which her theory questioned whether language contributed to women’s status in Western Europe…
states that the social constructions of gender are seen in drag performances. She explores the ideological construction of all gender roles, and rejects the view of drag as copy or imitation of true gender identity. She analyzes drag performances to explain how the gender performativity used by drag artists are not a subversion of the normative gender roles as they initially appear to be. Although drag performances are superficially a presentation of gender binaries, it is more useful to construe…
difference between sex and gender? Our sex is purely the biological differences between men and women. What chromosomes you are born with, your body hair, your hormones and your internal and external sexual anatomy. Gender however is the socially constructed characteristics that we define as either masculine or feminine. ‘Gender norms’ are the created specific entitlements and responsibilities to men and women which affect all aspects of our everyday social life. How gender comes to be “Quote about…
Michael Jha Mr. Gealy Ap Literature 8/22/13 Middlesex Gender is defined as the state of being male or female, typically used to determine factors of a person’s social role rather than a person’s biological makeup. Jeffrey Eugenides explains the importance of gender’s affect on how people are treated in his 2002 novel, Middlesex. The main character of the book is born intersex, and must go through many trials to discover his true identity and handle the expectations of others.…
Sex and Gender are Different: Sexual Identity and Gender Identity are Different Milton Diamond, Ph.D. University of Hawaii, John A. Burns School of Medicine Department of Anatomy and Reproductive Biology Pacific Center for Sex and Society Clinical Child Psychology & Psychiatry - Special Issue In Press for July 2002 Special Editors: Bernadette Wren, Portman Clinic Fiona Tasker, University of London Sex and Gender are Different: Sexual Identity and Gender Identity are Different Abstract:…
VERSAGE JUAN DAVID CABALLERO GENDER AND LANGUAGE: THOUGH PIECE It is remarkable how gendered language affects perceptions in our society. This phenomenon has been a research topic for many years. Sociolinguistics have shown interest in describing the differences in language use between women and men, and studies of the cultural roles ascribed to gender. This paper gender of language of Holmes and Meyerhoff aims at explaining the distinction between language and gender and how language supports, enforces…
Gender and Communication essay 3. Refer to the article on King of the Hill to address the following questions. A. Explain the terms “folly” and “ambivalence as discussed in the article. (4 pts) • Bobby hill is a current expression of the wise fool, demonstrating the fool and folly to prompt audiences to be more critical of contemporary culture, specifically gender performance. • A folly allows for new ways of seeing and thinking • Through Bobby’s folly, gender…
Austin Fey 03-20-13 Sociology 1301 Bem Essay Sandra Bem designed the Bem Sex Role test in 1971, this test was created to show the way psychology viewed gender. To me I believe that this test is not a reliable way to measure gender because, even if you answer the questions on the test to where they sound like what a women is like that doesn’t mean you are that. Say I answer all the questions that say I am a nice person who is always considerate of others, this doesn’t mean that I’m more like…
Gender switching has been found in movies for many years. One of the most recognized gender switching movies of all time is “Mrs. Doubtfire”. Mrs. Doubtfire seems to be an old, good-hearted babysitter, but is really a man named Daniel Hillary who wants to spend more time with his three children. He hides his true gender from his ex-wife in order to be the children’s babysitter. Daniel used the idea of gender switching in this movie to get closer to his children. Why is gender switching going on in…