We present a new method for personality assessment at a distance to uncover personality structure in historical texts. We focus on how two 19th century authors understood and described human personality; we apply a new bottom‐up computational approach to extract personality dimensions used by Jane Austen and Charles Dickens to describe fictional characters in 21 novels. We matched personality descriptions using three person‐description dictionaries marker scales as reference points for interpretation. Factor structures did not show strong convergence with the contemporary Big Five model. Jane Austen described characters in terms of social and emotional richness with greater nuances but using a less extensive vocabulary. Charles Dickens, in contrast, used a rich and diverse personality vocabulary, but those descriptions centred around more restricted dimensions of power and dominance. Although we could identify conceptually similar factors across the two authors, analyses of the overlapping vocabulary between the two authors suggested only moderate convergence. We discuss the utility and potential of automated text analysis and the lexical hypothesis to (i) provide insights into implicit personality models in historical texts and (ii) bridge the divide between idiographic and nomothetic perspectives. © 2020 European Association of Personality Psychology

No abstract

In this article we report about our efforts to develop and evaluate computational support tools for literary studies. We present a novel method and tool that allows interactive visual analytics of character occurrences in Victorian novels, and has been handed to humanities scholars and students for work with a number of novels from different authors. Our user study reveals insights about Victorian novels that are valuable for scholars in the digital humanities field, and informs UI as well as UX designers about how these domain experts interact with tools that leverage network science.

No abstract

This essay examines the pervasive language of chance in Anthony Trollope's Phineas Finn (1869) and argues that the novel's competing models of probability reveal tensions in the bildungsroman form. Although Phineas's advancement has been read as demonstrating Trollope's investment in the “career” as the form of individual development, the characterization of Phineas as an adventurer—and the depiction of romantic and political outcomes in London as stochastic—reveal a causal disjunction between individual choice and the mechanisms of social progress. Parliament is the setting of both Phineas's individual development and the plot of social progress, but the novel's use of competing languages and models of probability to describe the movement of the two reveals an incommensurability of scale. While Phineas's personal choices draw on a model of probability that manages chance by focusing on “odds” and rational decision making, his encounters with statistics in his parliamentary duties demonstrate how models of aggregation that mitigate chance and randomness cannot be reconciled with or incorporated into individual experience. Thus this essay argues that the novel's form, including its peculiar resolution, does not represent a reconciliation of Phineas's private and public identities but rather reflects a frustrated attempt to coordinate the progress of the individual with the progress of the nation.