Workshop: 'Computer-Based Literary Analysis', Bristol, 27 November 2015

This event is being organised by one of our graduate students, and there are still a few places left at time of writing. The event is free but registration is required.

Computer-based Literary Analysis

Professor Jan Christoph Meister,  University of Hamburg

 

Friday 27 November, 9.30 to 4.30

Biomedical Teaching Lab E2.1 PC Room, University of Bristol

This workshop is open to postgraduate students and staff working in the humanities, in particular in literary and language studies, including translation. The workshop is free.

 

It requires no previous experience of corpus linguistics software, and will be led by Professor Jan Christoph Meister (Hamburg), who heads the team which has developed the free, web-based software which will be used, known as CATMA (Computer Aided Textual Markup and Analysis).

CATMA is a practical and intuitive tool for literary scholars, students and other parties with an interest in text analysis and literary research. In contrast to most corpus linguistics software, the program combines standard features such as wordlists and collocation searches with the ability to mark up texts in a user-defined way, prior to analysing them quantitatively. It is also designed to facilitate collaborative work on literary texts and allows for the easy sharing of data and metadata. It can be used with individual texts or corpora of multiple texts, in a wide variety of languages.

The philosophy underlying its development is that computers can now be used to complement the traditional close reading of literary texts with quantitative analysis of various narrative, stylistic and linguistic features to gain a deeper understanding of texts and to develop and test various interpretations of them. Examples of the kinds of use to which CATMA can be put include:

•          analysing various aspects of narrative form and structure such as events and actions

•          analysing aspects of literary style of a text such as sentence length and lexical richness

•          analysing language use

•          searching texts for words or phrases and their collocates

•          comparing translations with source texts

The workshop will provide a hands-on introduction to the software and its capabilities, and there will opportunities for you to discuss how you might use it in your own research.

CATMA can be found at: http://www.catma.de/ and also at http://www.catma.de/clea

Tea, coffee and a light buffet lunch will be provided. Participants are responsible for their own travel costs.

Booking a place:

The workshop will be limited to 20 people. If you wish to book a place, or have any questions, please contact roy.youdale[at]bristol.ac.uk.