Dr Michał Choiński (IFA UJ) and Dr. Dennis Mischke (UniPostdam) received a seed funding grant from the German Ministry of Education to establish research cooperation between the Digital Humanities lab at the Universität Potsdam and the Institute of English Studies at the Jagiellonian University.
The grant project "Network-Analysis and Spatial Stylometry in American Studies (NASSA)" will continue for one year, and will include 8 researchers (among others, Dr hab. Jan Rybicki from IFA UJ, Dr hab. Maciej Eder from the Institute of Polish Language at the Polish Academy of Sciences), Tim Repke (Hasso Plattner Institute) and Mathias Göbel (SUB-Göttingen).
The seed-funding grant springs from stylometric research conducted by Dr Michał Choiński and Dr hab. Jan Rybicki. Earlier, the two researchers participated in an OPUS grant awarded by the Polish National Science Centre, and in which they employed the “stylo” package to investigate the authorship of 18th-century American colonial texts.
- “We’re using stylometry - that is, a computer-based method which allows to establish the author of a text by calculating the frequencies of words. Such calculations allow us to determine who wrote a given text or its elements. We use this method for historical-literary research into American literature” explains dr Michał Choiński. “The seed-funding grant at the University of Postdam is aimed at creating the infrastructure to establish cooperation between academic institutions regarding stylometric exploration of large collections of texts connected with American history. Our research is conducted with the “stylo” package authored by Dr hab. Maciej Eder, Dr hab. Jan Rybicki and Dr Mike Kestemont from the University of Antwerp. We also hope to encourage cooperation with American universities. For now, Jonathan Edwards Centre at Yale University expressed interest in our research on the 18th-century colonial sermon corpora.”
Both Dr Michał Choiński and Dr hab. Jan Rybicki have presented their research at numerous guest lectures and conferences in such countries as the US, Canda, Australia, the UK, Germany, Russia, or Italy.
