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Rereading the American Short Story The Explorative Value of Computational Methods: Rereading the American Short Story Stephanie Siewert and Nils Reiter ABSTRACT This article explores the use of computational methods to study stylistic and content shifts of the nineteenth-century short story. It is generally assumed that the modern American short story somehow represents the democratic discourse of the United States. This paper argues that an explorative computational approach can help us to reconsider the connections between the textual patterns of the short story and U.S.-American modernity. We offer a critical, digital perspective on the distribution of certain indicative linguistic features across 123 short stories from 1840 to 1916. We used methods from computational linguistics to automatically anno- tate the texts with various linguistic properties (named entities and direct speech, for instance). The quantitative results of automated text processing are presented against the backdrop of the major social, economic, and cultural developments of the time. Our findings provide further insights on the tensions between processes of individualization and economic dependencies dur- ing the nineteenth century, especially with respect to the publishing industry. In addition, we propose that the more experimental nature of a macro-analytical perspective can direct our attention to texts or groups of texts that remain underestimated as to their literary value or exemplary nature for a certain topical, structural, or linguistic pattern. In this vein, the article offers a close reading of Thomas Bailey Aldrich’s short story “Mademoiselle Olympe Zabriski,” which features an above-average number of proper names within the corpus. When re-read in the light of quantitative results, we see the text comment humorously on 1870s class issues in New England. Thus, the article offers an example of how humanities research can benefit from quantitative approaches. To conclude, the article promotes the gains of digital literary analysis for future research in American Studies. 1 Introduction In 2015, the British Comma Press released MacGuffin, a new digital self-pub- lishing platform for fiction, essays, and poetry, where users can pick their favorite short stories according to theme and length. What makes the platform different from all other popular blogging and fan fiction sites is the open analytics section, visible to both readers and authors. Writers and their publishers can test the at- tractiveness of narrative structures, measured according to the time each visitor spends reading a story.1 The platform might provide a way to revitalize the slow- selling short story, which lags behind the more popular genre of the novel. While the publishing industry has been less reluctant to use innovative techniques of data mining to evaluate their products and to place them more 1 See Bridle. 200 Stephanie Siewert and Nils Reiter effectively,2 universities and scholars still seem to shy away from the critical po- tential of digitally (re)mastered artefacts. While we should not hastily abandon established working tools in light of “ever-shorter cycles of innovation” (Kelleter 383), the digitization of culture will continue. Digital Humanities (DH), practiced as a (self-)critical and interdisciplinary effort, are “needed as a collective player— as a lobbying force and resource of practice and strategies” to meet the challenges of the digital age (Kelleter 387).3 Most objects of scholarly interest are multimodal and exist in a spectrum of analytical environments—computational methods simply extend their scope into a digital arena. The example of MacGuffin could be turned into a rewarding DH project on human attention and/or reader-response in the digital age if combined with a critical perspective on data mining tools and their epistemological value.4 Alternatively, one might also use digital methods to reassess these short stories and to look for patterns across extended periods of time and spatial scope.5 That also applies to a different corpus and historical material. In this vein, the follow- ing essay explores stylistic shifts in U.S.-American short fiction during the nine- teenth century with the help of computational methods. The genre itself has inspired a multifarious and at times overwhelming critical discourse, a quality that also holds true for the numerous efforts to demarcate its boundaries. Ruth Suckow wrote in 1927 that America is “the land of the defini- tion of the short story” (317-18), and yet the genre itself seems as elusive as ever.6 In fact, Oliver Scheiding has pointed out that the American short story is still 2 On a similar note, short-story dispensers owned by the French publisher ShortÉdition are increasingly gaining in popularity and have now reached Great Britain and the U.S. (ShortÉdi- tion; see also Flood). They are a welcome distraction for people waiting in line at an airport, train station, or elsewhere. The vending machine prints original stories on demand depending on how much time each user has to spare. 3 It is rather surprising that the pre-selection of the German Excellence Initiative 2017, which included 88 project proposals, rather skiped over the digital turn in the social sciences, law, economics, and cultural studies. However, the DFG listed three promising projects on data analysis in the humanities (TU Darmstadt), algorithms and the informational society (Karl- sruher Institut für Technologie), and hermeneutical processes with a strong DH focus (Stuttgart/ Tübingen). See: dfg.de/en/research_funding/programmes/excellence_initiative/index.html. 4 DH should (and already do) brace themselves against the technophile, affirmative, big data hype that supports the logic of market mechanisms and its rhetoric of accessibility and transparency. 5 As Kathleen Fitzpatrick states: “The particular contribution of the Digital Humanities, however, lies in its exploration of the difference that the digital can make to the kinds of work that we do as well as to the ways that we communicate with one another. These new modes of scholarship and communication will best flourish if they, like the Digital Humanities, are al- lowed to remain plural” (14). 6 The short story is a rather ‘young’ genre. As F. L. Pattee argues, “it began to be used more and more during the sixties and the seventies, but never in a generic sense; always the emphasis on the first word” (291). Taking up on Edgar Allan Poe’s ideas in “Philosophy of Composition,” Brander Matthews formalized the short story as a distinct art form that, for him, even exceeds the novel due to its “unity of impression” (17). Matthews provided a thorough definition of the short story in his seminal work “The Philosophy of the Short Story” (1901), but had first ex- pressed his ideas in an article in the Saturday Review in 1984. The Explorative Value of Computational Methods 201 “undertheorized” (235). A quantitative analysis might allow us to understand and conceptualize modern short fiction in different and potentially new ways, without doing away with qualitative work in the field. Hence, can a large-scale analysis support, specify or challenge certain assumptions about nineteenth-century short fiction? Among American studies scholars it is generally accepted that a more ‘democratic’ register came to dominate fictional prose and that the everyday as- sumed a central role as sujet, setting, and language. This includes a development from earlier plot-driven romantic tales towards character-based realistic stories, a shift from telling to showing, and an emphasis on vernacular culture (Bendixen 3-19). In comparing early romantic tales such as Washington Irving’s “Rip van Winkle” to Mark Twain’s realist story “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Cala- veras County,” one is inclined to predict a development from longer to shorter stories. Yet do stories actually get shorter, and if so, does this correlate with a change in other metrics? Can we conceptualize developments of the short story during the nineteenth century on the basis of certain linguistic features to come to a more nuanced view on broad trends in the history of the short story? This article offers a critical, digital perspective on the distribution of certain indicative linguistic features across short stories from 1840 to 1916. Read against the backdrop of major social, economic, and cultural developments in the pub- lishing industry, our findings provide further insights on the tensions between processes of individualization and economic dependencies during the nineteenth century. In the long run, computational analysis might help us to understand which changes in narrative style actually reflect a more general concern with mo- dernity in the United States. To begin with, we will review general methodological considerations that form the basis of our work (Section 2). This will help to situate our approach in the larger framework of digital scholarship and in particular, with respect to the relation be- tween quantitative and qualitative research. Section 3 presents our corpus of 123 short stories and its internal composition before we will turn to the text-processing components (sentence splitting, part of speech tagging, lemmatization), and their evaluation (Section 4). In the following section, we will present and discuss the quantitative results of automated text processing in the form of plots organized by publication year on the x-axis (time series). In some cases we provide brief interpre- tations, which, in the spirit of an explorative analysis,7
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