2024/02/18 by Svenja Guhr, Mark Algee-Hewitt
#19th century #English #Gothic fiction #ambient sound #literary prose #sound studies
paper · doi:10.48694/jcls.3583
This paper presents an approach to operationalizing ambient sound as a literary phenomenon. To illustrate the importance of the ambient soundscape in literary studies, we both manually and automatically detect ambient sound markers and use these annotations to analyze a sample of nineteenth-century English novels and short stories. Our hypothesis is that descriptions of a story’s ambient soundscape can be associated with specific genres, and is, for example, a hallmark of Gothic novels. We use a classification approach based on a state-of-the-art transfer learning algorithm and a domain-dependent fine-tuned BERT model for English to automatically detect word-level sound indicators and compare their occurrence over the course of the fiction and with a comparative view on our corpus texts.