Hoover on CaSTA and breadth.
David Hoover is at NYU, and is the Vice-President of the Association for Computers and the Humanities. The full title of his paper is “CaSTAing breadth upon the waters.” (“Cast thy bread upon the waters: for thou shalt find it after many days,” say Ecclesiastes 11 – hence his title.)
DH seeks simple methods for examining word frequencies in corpora of single authors, at different stages of their production. Do authors tend to start disliking (using less) words they used to like (use a lot) earlier in their careers? Or vice versa? How does an author’s vocabulary change over her production’s life? DH does a lot of statistics to try to find out.
He’s talking about Trollope, about whom I know nothing. Apparently, the 100 most variable words in his corpus are all proper names. They also all appear in more than one stage of his writing career (early-middle-late). Henry James, however, has some non-proper nouns.
DH’s project is very much in progress; he says it’ll be a while until he has something interesting to say about the evolution of writerly language. One interesting question is: if you have a writer who starts writing very young, does their vocabulary change quickly, early on? What about writers who write far into old age?
One interesting consistency in James is that he seems to have used fewer “precious” nouns as the years went on: words like coquette and tresses.