Logos Sophokleios/Logoi Sophokleioi

An experiment with TF-IDF and the Sophoclean corpus (excluding Trackers and fragments).

Overview

Select interactive charts can (barring application failure) be viewed here: https://logos-sophokleios.fly.dev/apps/logos-sophokleios --- please reach out if you need the password.

All of the raw data are also available under files.

These results represent early experiments in "guided close-reading."

The texts are those from the Perseus Digital Library.

Lemmatization was performed using the CLTK.

These experiments use TF-IDF to create weighted vectors for each character's speech in a tragedy. Every line of a character's speech can then be compared with the other characters' "bag of words" to approximate "similarity" or "characteristicness."

For example, to score a line from Character A:

• Let L be a line from Character A.
• Let B be the vector of all lemmata from Character B.
• Calculate the average of every lemma w in L, taking the weight for w in B (or 0 if w ∉ B).
• Divide the average by the max score in B (to help adjust for vector differences)

These scores can then be plotted for visual comparison.

Areas for improvement

• The lemmatization process is consistent, but it is not perfect.
• I'm not entirely convinced that dividing by the max score for the compared character is the correct way to normalize the scores. (Cosine similarity is another common method of comparison, but it seems to answer the wrong question here: the experiments here want to look at the relative magnitude of one character's speech compared to other characters' speeches, not at how similar their individual weights are for a given line.)

Additional experiments

• Compare same-named speakers in different plays

  • Oedipus (OT, OC)
  • Odysseus (Ajax, Philoctetes)
  • Antigone (Antigone, OC)
  • Ismene (Antigone, OC)
  • Creon (Antigone, OT, OC)

• Cross-genre comparisons (epic and tragedy)

• Microphilology (comparing tokens at the sub-word level)?

LICENSE

The MIT License

Copyright 2023 Charles Pletcher

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