British fiction and poetry explodes with textual visuality in the early twentieth century: color, shape, and form, as manifested in description, impression, and image. This dissertation computationally models that visuality, using the eye as a governing metaphor: retinal cones are modeled by inferring textual color, and retinal rods are modeled through object-detection via word sense disambiguation and categorization.
Findings include a 93% increase in color expressions across the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a 15% increase in the proportions of object and artifacts, and revealing correlations along lines of literary genre, subject heading, and more. These correlate with historical materialities such a dye manufacture, trends in the visual arts such as post-impressionism, and movements in literature such as imagism.
A model of literary description, meanwhile, finds that, while visuality increases over time, proportions of description decrease, suggesting structural decompositions in fiction, occurring in parallel with disseminations of vision.
NOTE: To view an interactive archived copy of this dissertation, please see the Columbia University Libraries Archive-It version here: https://wayback.archive-it.org/1914/20230920182940/https://dissertation.jonreeve.com/
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:columbia.edu/oai:academiccommons.columbia.edu:10.7916/z4zv-7720 |
| Date | January 2023 |
| Creators | Reeve, Jonathan |
| Source Sets | Columbia University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Theses |
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