Software reveals the most influential Victorian novelists

THINK of the great 19th-century novelists and names like Dickens, Hardy and the Bront?s immediately spring to mind. In terms of influence on other writers, though, the biggest hitters of the era were behind what some call sigh-worthy romance novels and a boyhood adventure yarn.

That's according to a new method of analysing texts using a customised version of Google's PageRank algorithm. Fans of Pride and Prejudice (see picture) and Ivanhoe will be delighted: the system claims the era's most influential authors are Jane Austen and Walter Scott.

The finding is based on a study of digitised copies of over 3500 novels published in English between 1780 and 1900. To gauge influence within this set, Matthew Jockers, now at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln, developed software that categorises novels according to the frequencies with which certain words appear, as well as how the words are grouped to form themes. The result is a series of "fingerprints", each made up of 600 data points, which characterise the novels.

To make sense of the result, Jockers assembled the novels into a network in which the strength of the links between two books is determined by the similarity of their fingerprints.

He completed the process by adapting PageRank ndash; the algorithm Google uses as the cornerstone of its strategy for identifying the importance of web pages. His modified algorithm singled out novels with the strongest and most numerous links to works that came after them, and it declared Austen and Scott top.

"The signals introduced by Austen and Scott position them at the beginning of a stylistic-thematic genealogy; they are, in this sense, the literary equivalent of Homo erectus or, if you prefer, Adam and Eve," Jockers wrote in a paper that was presented at the Digital Humanities conference in Hamburg, Germany, last month.

The result may surprise some readers, since Austen is often attacked in popular culture for her focus on romantic themes. But it makes a lot of sense to scholars of Victorian literature. "In some sense it is an eerie return to some of the histories of the novel written by Victorians themselves, which tended to single out Austen and Scott as progenitors," says Nicholas Dames, chair of the department of English and comparative literature at Columbia University in New York.

The finding comes with some caveats, says Jockers. Austen and Scott appear in the earlier part of the period covered by the data, for example. This does not put the pair's powerful influence in doubt, but does reduce the data on writers who influenced them. There are also other methods, aside from the Google algorithm, of gauging which nodes in a network are the most influential. These might produce different answers. "Everything is experimental and preliminary," says Jockers. "The big picture is still to unfold."

Despite such uncertainties, the technique is being welcomed by many as a new way to study literature. "The big promise of such work is its ability to give us a sense of something like the entirety of, say, 19th-century fiction, rather than the small percentage of canonical texts that are usually taken as exemplary," says Dames. "What Jockers is doing is forcing us to re-evaluate if our canonical subset is really as influential, or as central, as we think it is."

Jockers developed his techniques at Stanford University in California, where he worked with literature researcher Franco Moretti, who pioneered the use of automated large-scale analyses of digitised texts, a process he calls "distant reading".

The term contrasts with the traditional technique of close reading, in which individual texts are examined in detail. "The two methods are complementary ndash; one helps us understand the system of literature, the other helps us understand why literature is important," says Laura Caroll at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia.

If you would like to reuse any content from New Scientist, either in print or online, please contact the syndication department first for permission. New Scientist does not own rights to photos, but there are a variety of licensing options available for use of articles and graphics we own the copyright to.

Have your say

Only subscribers may leave comments on this article. Please log in.

Only personal subscribers may leave comments on this article

Subscribe now to comment.

All comments should respect the New Scientist House Rules. If you think a particular comment breaks these rules then please use the "Report" link in that comment to report it to us.

If you are having a technical problem posting a comment, please contact technical support.

Source: http://feeds.newscientist.com/c/749/f/10897/s/2270307f/l/0L0Snewscientist0N0Carticle0Cmg215287750B0A0A0A0Esoftware0Ereveals0Ethe0Emost0Einfluential0Evictorian0Enovelists0Bhtml0DDCMP0FOTC0Erss0Gnsref0Fonline0Enews/story01.htm

shepard fairey is snooki pregnant snooki pregnant gbc hedy lamarr jack white kowloon walled city