Online Demo of a Computational Tool for Distant and Close Reading of English Literature

This is the first stable tool release that refers to the online demonstration hosted at https://stia.shinyapps.io/tlit/

The system, which is using the Transcendental Information Cascades (TIC) approach to generate a temporal network representation of a text or text corpus, allows to track co-occurrence of characters in English novels (the demo involves four novels authored by Charles Dickens). The approach can be adapted to create TIC networks using generic bigram and trigram phrase matching for example or matching other kinds of entities (e.g. places), which will work on any text that can be found on Project Gutenberg.

Transcendental Information Cascades are a model based grounded on the assumption that there are meaningful relationships to be found in coincidence.

References:

Adam Grener, Markus Luczak-Roesch, Emma Fenton, & Tom Goldfinch. (2017). Towards a Computational Literary Science: A Computational Approach to Dickens’ Dynamic Character Networks. Zenodo, https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.259499.

Luczak-Rösch, Markus, Tinati, Ramine and Shadbolt, Nigel (2015) When resources collide: towards a theory of coincidence in information spaces. In, WWW 2015 Companion, Florence, IT, 6pp. (doi:10.1145/2740908.2743973).

Luczak-Roesch, M., Tinati, R., Van Kleek, M. and Shadbolt, N., 2015, August. From coincidence to purposeful flow? properties of transcendental information cascades. In 2015 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining (ASONAM) (pp. 633-638). IEEE.