seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents. 1 Periodizing Samuel Beckett's Works: A Stylochronometric Approach 1 Dirk van Hulle and Mike Kestemont UNIVERSITY OF ANTWERP ABSTRACT:We report the first analysis of Samuel Beckett's prose writings using stylometry, or the quantitative study of writing style, focusing on grammatical function words, a linguistic category that has seldom been studied before in Beckett studies. To these function words, we apply methods from computational stylometry and model the stylistic evolution in Beckett's oeuvre. Our analyses reveal a number of discoveries that shed new light on existing periodizations in the secondary literature, which commonly distinguish an "early," "middle," and "late" period in Beckett's oeuvre. We analyze Beckett's prose writings in both English and French, demonstrating notable symmetries and asymmetries between both languages. The analyses nuance the traditional three-part periodization as they show the possibility of stylistic relapses (disturbing the linearity of most periodizations) as well as different turning points depending on the language of the corpus, suggesting that Beckett's English oeuvre is not identical to his French oeuvre in terms of patterns of stylistic development.

No abstract

No abstract

Interoperability is the key term within the framework of the European-funded research project Interedition, 1 whose aim is 'to encourage the creators of tools for textual scholarship to make their functionality available to others, and to promote communication between scholars so that we can raise awareness of innovative working methods.' The tools developed by Interedition's 'Prototyping' working group needed to be tested by other research teams, which formulate strategic recommendations. To this purpose, the Centre for Manuscript Genetics (University of Antwerp), the Huygens Institute for the History of the Netherlands (The Hague) and the University of Würzburg have been working together within the framework of Interedition.One of the concrete results of collaboration is the development and fine-tuning of the text collation tool CollateX. 2 In this paper we would like to investigate how the architecture of a digital archive containing modern manuscripts can be designed in such a way that users can autonomously collate textual units of their choice with the help of the collation tool CollateX and thus decide for themselves how this digital architecture functions -as an archive, as a genetic dossier, or as an edition. The first part introduces CollateX and its internal concepts and heuristics as a tool for digitally supported collation. How this tool can be integrated in the infrastructure of an electronic edition is discussed in part two. The third and final part examines the possibility of deploying CollateX for the collation of modern manuscripts by means of a test CollateX is an open source Java collation engine, developed, maintained, and supported by an international open source development community (OSDC) of developers active in the digital humanities community. Having originated and finding a number of applications in several projects of the Huygens Institute for the History of the Netherlands, the final coordination of development currently rests with this institute. However the code is in the public domain: https://github.com/interedition/collatex case: the Beckett Digital Manuscript Project (www.beckettarchive.org). Computer supported collation with CollateXFollowing John Unsworth's textual scholarship workflow typology of scholarly primitives (Unsworth, 2000), it is clear that text comparison is pivotal to any kind of textual scholarship. The role of text comparison becomes paramount in any scholarly editing project that involves critical enquiries about the edited text witnessed in multiple versions. Conducting such a comparison of a text's versions manually or -to use the proper terminology of the field -'collating them' classifies as tedious and error-prone work, 3 especially as the required attention to detail is highly demanding when measured against the repetitive and (sometimes) mechanical nature of the task. From that perspective, this type of work seems an ideal candidate for automation, not only because computers can support users in tedious, error-prone duties rather efficiently, but sp...

No abstract