Listening at a Distance: Reading the Sound World of Gothic Literature with Topic Modeling and Text Analysis
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Traditionally text-focused digital humanities tools can assist in sound studies research by revealing patterns in how sound is described in historical text. When combined with close reading, these patterns facilitate insight into how sound was interpreted and communicated in time periods for which no sound recording technology existed. This article centers on the literary works of gothic author Ann Radcliffe (1764–1823), whose texts have been recognized for their inclusion of rich descriptions of sound. I examine the results of text analysis and topic modeling performed on Radcliffe’s corpus in the context of how contemporaneous aestheticians understood and wrote about sound. The results reveal that Radcliffe’s sonic language encompasses a comprehensive and calculated narrative use of sound, which reflects an understanding of theories on obscurity, sublime terror, and associationism put forward by aestheticians during her time. On a larger level, this article illustrates the mutual value that stems from integrating digital humanities and sound studies research: analyzing sonic language expands the types of questions to which visually oriented digital humanities tools can be applied, and digital tools aid in excavating otherwise silent sound worlds of the past. RésuméLes outils des humanités numériques qui sont traditionnellement focalisés sur les textes peuvent aider dans la recherche des sons en dévoilant des modèles concernant la façon dont le son est décrit dans des textes historiques. Une fois combinés avec la lecture attentive, ces modèles facilitent des aperçus de la manière dont le son a été interprété et communiqué pendant des époques où aucune technologie d’enregistrement sonore n’existait. Cet article se concentre sur les oeuvres littéraires de l’auteure Ann Radcliffe (1764–1823), dont les textes sont connus pour l’inclusion de descriptions riches du son. J’examine les résultats d’analyses de textes, ainsi que ceux des modélisations thématiques réalisées sur le corpus de Radcliffe, en prenant en compte l’interprétation et le traitement des sons d’esthéticiens contemporains. Les résultats indiquent que le langage sonique de Radcliffe inclut l’usage narratif étendu et calculé d’un langage sonique qui reflète une interprétation théorique de l’obscurité, de la peur sublime et de l’associationnisme que les esthéticiens avançaient à l’époque. À plus grande échelle, cet article présente la valeur mutuelle qui se produit grâce à l’intégration des humanités numériques et de la recherche des études de son : analyser le langage sonique enrichit les types de questions auxquelles les outils axés sur les aspects visuels des humanités numériques peuvent s’appliquer, et les outils numériques aident à extraire du passé des mondes sonores, qui seraient autrement silencieux. Mots-clés: modélisation thématique; analyse de texte; son; Ann Radcliffe; gothique; sublime
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".