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be nice to written words Recently I’ve spotted a publisher’s announcement for a "million words novel". Wow, million words! Aren’t you impressed? Well, I’m not. The very idea of using the number of words as a qualifying criterion for a novel is a downgrading of a novel. The publisher must be carried astray by the current euphoria with Big Data. Does he think that, just because previously counting words with finger and pencil was tedious, literary critics did not use that criterion? And nowadays computers make the task gratifying? Should we expect announcements about the number of semicolons (;), quotation marks ("), exclamation symbols (!) and triple dots (...)? OK, I’ve got carried away - number of semicolons would do only a core statistician. A literary statistician will count the number of unique words, proper names excluded at the higher level of the approach, probably after several Pd.D. theses on the subject. Further on, some key unique words could be used for the classifi- cation of literary works. For instance, the occurrence of the word fuck could be used as a delimiter of so called contemporary literature. |
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