Forum / fascinating and suggestive w/o being definitive

• 
  strannikov

  Mar 30, 01:27pm

  http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0059030

  Some may groan over applying quantitative analysis and measurement to humanities, so just breathe deeply before proceeding, taking care to inhale and exhale calmly.

  This one study cannot possibly tell all and doesn't seem to purport to, but the approach seems valid even if the conclusions seem at all questionable. Fictionauters of actual mathematic competence can better judge the methodology, but the rest of us can ooh and ahh at least a little over what this might signify. If anything, such studies need to enlarge their scope, but perhaps statistical models of stylistics have not yet matured.

  (If not fascinating, at least interesting. If not interesting, at least topical.)

• Frankie Saxx

  Mar 30, 09:32pm

  This is fascinating. Thank you for the link.

• 
  Gloria Garfunkel

  Mar 30, 09:38pm

  My spouse is a sociologist with a specialty in the arts and loved this. Thank you so much.

• 
  Marcus Speh

  Mar 30, 09:39pm

  Light Easter reading...Google's Ngram is a fantastic tool. The results reported in this article seem to hang on the assumption that "content-free words are a good proxy for stylistic change"...this seems rather a mechanistic approach. I don't know the study by Hughes but it makes my skin crawl a little—having said that, many scientific results make my skin crawl a little because of the recklessness of their assumptions, interpretations and, sadly, because of the great admiration that the general public bestows on any form of statistical analysis. I have come to loathe statistics because I know too much about its possibilities to obscure the truth, I think. Enjoyed.

• 
  Gloria Garfunkel

  Mar 30, 10:07pm

  I think all expert statisticians are fully aware of the possibilities of obscuring the truth and this divides the ethical from the unethical. You can't just lump them all together with you the only ethical judge.

• 
  Marcus Speh

  Mar 30, 10:31pm

  Too many years in science must have turned me into a wisenheimer and faultfinder...

• 
  strannikov

  Mar 31, 12:07am

  @ Marcus: along lines I sketched in response to your post on the Lennon-Chaon debate, I think if this methodology has anything to commend it, it needs to be refined by measuring earlier periods whose histories (literary and social) are better documented than our "recent history" which is still being created. Surveys of Latin literature from Plautus to Juvenal, say, or Greek lit from Aristophanes to Lucian, or British lit from Spenser and Sidney to Larkin and Burgess. (A special study of the "ancient vs. modern" dispute of the late 17th-early 18th cents. might be useful, too.)

• 
  Gloria Garfunkel

  Mar 31, 06:43am

  The statisticians who study art love art and are curious about the results of applying their methodologies including amazing graphs and charts that are artistic in themselves. They do it out of intellectual curiosity, not to cure cancer. They know it is purely speculative and are just having fun with it. It's just another perspective on art and literary history really.

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