Presentation Title
The Gilgamesh Search Engine: Patterns of Style, Topic, and Sentiment in 20th-Century Genre Fiction
Abstract
Leveraging the full-text TEI markup of over 300 pulp magazines from The Pulp Magazines Project, we suggest potential new directions for scholarly inquiry into early twentieth-century periodical studies, popular fiction, and genre studies. Through the development of our parallel project, the Gilgamesh Search Engine, we offer strategies for large-scale text mining and topic modeling of over 40,000,000 words. The Project is bringing digital research technologies to bear on its large and growing archive of high-quality full-text, cover-to-cover facsimiles. Finally, we present some examples of our own ongoing “pulp studies” research of the past two years, identifying patterns of style, topic, and sentiment across four centuries of literary texts (6,000 documents) that influenced the writing of early twentieth-century popular periodical fiction in the pulps. Through our research and preservation efforts at the Project, we are raising the public profile of this important facet of twentieth-century popular print culture, and helping to develop more quantitative methods for realizing the full potential of studying the art and literature of pulp magazines.
The Gilgamesh Search Engine: Patterns of Style, Topic, and Sentiment in 20th-Century Genre Fiction
Leveraging the full-text TEI markup of over 300 pulp magazines from The Pulp Magazines Project, we suggest potential new directions for scholarly inquiry into early twentieth-century periodical studies, popular fiction, and genre studies. Through the development of our parallel project, the Gilgamesh Search Engine, we offer strategies for large-scale text mining and topic modeling of over 40,000,000 words. The Project is bringing digital research technologies to bear on its large and growing archive of high-quality full-text, cover-to-cover facsimiles. Finally, we present some examples of our own ongoing “pulp studies” research of the past two years, identifying patterns of style, topic, and sentiment across four centuries of literary texts (6,000 documents) that influenced the writing of early twentieth-century popular periodical fiction in the pulps. Through our research and preservation efforts at the Project, we are raising the public profile of this important facet of twentieth-century popular print culture, and helping to develop more quantitative methods for realizing the full potential of studying the art and literature of pulp magazines.
