Project Abstract

The materials for our class project consists of a corpus of 134 British, American, and other children's fictional works published between 1880 and 1889, plus a comparison corpus of 451 British novels intended for adults published in the same years.¹  We focused on comparing British children's and adult's fiction from the 1880s.  Applying various text analysis methods as well as topic modeling, we explored the following issues (out of many that could have been chosen):

• Differences between female and male-authored novels.
• Differences between the way "boys" and "girls" are portrayed in the novels (e.g., how the words "won't" and "don't" co-occur with each).
• Differences between the children's and adult fiction in general.

In particular, our text analysis team studied the behavior of the words "boys," "girls," "won't," and "don't" in the children's corpus; and also used text analysis to look more closely at several individual novels.  Our topic modeling team created topic models (300 topics in each) for specific segments of our corpora in order to study the top themes in the children's and adult works.

Notes

^1. Works in our children's literature corpus came from Project Gutenberg's "Children's Bookshelf" category.  We drew works of fiction (mostly novels, but including some short fiction) from all the subcategories on that bookshelf, constraining our selection to works published in the 1880s.  Works in our adult fiction corpus came from the corpus of 2,731 nineteenth-century British novels given to us by the Stanford Literary Lab (originally gathered by the Lab from the Internet Archive and Project Gutenberg).  We constrained our selection to male and female authored novels of the 1880s.

^2. F