title: Quantitative criticism of literary relationships.
abstract: Authors often convey meaning by referring to or imitating prior works of literature, a process that creates complex networks of literary relationships ("intertextuality") and contributes to cultural evolution. In this paper, we use techniques from stylometry and machine learning to address subjective literary critical questions about Latin literature, a corpus marked by an extraordinary concentration of intertextuality. Our work, which we term "quantitative criticism," focuses on case studies involving two influential Roman authors, the playwright Seneca and the historian Livy. We find that four plays related to but distinct from Seneca's main writings are differentiated from the rest of the corpus by subtle but important stylistic features. We offer literary interpretations of the significance of these anomalies, providing quantitative data in support of hypotheses about the use of unusual formal features and the interplay between sound and meaning. The second part of the paper describes a machine-learning approach to the identification and analysis of citational material that Livy loosely appropriated from earlier sources. We extend our approach to map the stylistic topography of Latin prose, identifying the writings of Caesar and his near-contemporary Livy as an inflection point in the development of Latin prose style. In total, our results reflect the integration of computational and humanistic methods to investigate a diverse range of literary questions.
authors.affiliation: Department of Systems Biology, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA 02115; jdexter@fas.harvard.edu pramit.chaudhuri@austin.utexas.edu.
authors.forename: Joseph P
authors.initials: JP
authors.lastname: Dexter
authors.affiliation: The Dalton School, New York, NY 10128.|Research Science Institute, Center for Excellence in Education, McClean, VA 22102.|Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139.
authors.forename: Theodore
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Katz
authors.affiliation: Department of Engineering, University of Cambridge, Cambridge CB2 1PZ, United Kingdom.
authors.forename: Nilesh
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Tripuraneni
authors.affiliation: Department of Systems Biology, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA 02115.
authors.forename: Tathagata
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Dasgupta
authors.affiliation: Department of Computer Science, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH 03755.
authors.forename: Ajay
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Kannan
authors.affiliation: Department of Computer Science, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH 03755.
authors.forename: James A
authors.initials: JA
authors.lastname: Brofos
authors.affiliation: Department of Classics, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH 03755.
authors.forename: Jorge A
authors.initials: JA
authors.lastname: Bonilla Lopez
authors.affiliation: Department of Classics, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH 03755.
authors.forename: Lea A
authors.initials: LA
authors.lastname: Schroeder
authors.affiliation: Austin Independent School District, Austin, TX 78703.
authors.forename: Adriana
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Casarez
authors.affiliation: Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720.
authors.forename: Maxim
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Rabinovich
authors.affiliation: Department of Classics, University of Texas, Austin, TX 78712.
authors.forename: Ayelet
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Haimson Lushkov
authors.affiliation: Department of Classics, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH 03755; jdexter@fas.harvard.edu pramit.chaudhuri@austin.utexas.edu.|Department of Classics, University of Texas, Austin, TX 78712.
authors.forename: Pramit
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Chaudhuri
mesh_terms: D003468:Cultural Evolution; D006801:Humans; D008093:Literature, Modern
keywords: authorship attribution; cultural evolution; intertextuality; machine learning; stylometry