Videos by Jeroen De Gussem
This paper was presented as part of the British Academy-funded conference ‘The Literature and His... more This paper was presented as part of the British Academy-funded conference ‘The Literature and History of Anglo-Dutch Relations, Medieval to Early Modern’, which was held online between 6 – 8 January 2022. Accessible on YouTube here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nQvcVlpokB4&t=955s. 4 views
Papers by Jeroen De Gussem
Routledge Medieval Encyclopedia Online, 2022
This entry gives a survey of the application of computational stylistics to medieval texts. Compu... more This entry gives a survey of the application of computational stylistics to medieval texts. Computational stylistics, alternatively stylometry, is an umbrella term for a set of computer algorithms that quantify and statistically harvest a document’s stylistic features in order to make statistically informed deductions concerning authorship, dating, influence, provenance and/or stylistic-literary characteristics. The entry firstly traces the history of the method from proto-stylometric ancestors such as the sixteenth-century humanist Lorenzo Valla to modern twentieth-century founding fathers Frederick Mosteller and David L. Wallace. Secondly, it traces the broad diversity of research aims that scholars of the Middle Ages have when making use of this method, e.g. authorship attribution, the impact of time on style (stylochronometry), the influence of copyists and scribes, assessing dependencies between manuscripts, tracing reliances on same source texts or school models, literary collaboration, scriptological and dialectological questions, translingual influence, the impact of genre, etc. Thirdly, the entry surveys some of the most common techniques applied to medieval texts (preprocessing, feature extraction and selection, vectorization and scaling, data analysis and visualization). In conclusion, an attempt at an adequate summary is made of the future(s) which practitioners of stylometry for medieval texts envision for this relatively young field.
Revue Mabillon, 2022
This paper deploys a double method of stylometric and contextual analysis in order to review and ... more This paper deploys a double method of stylometric and contextual analysis in order to review and refine historiographical arguments about the authorship by the cleric-turned-monk Thierry of Fleury/Trier/Amorbach (fl. 970-1020s) of a range of hagiographies, sermons, exegetical works, and a customary of the abbey of Fleury. In doing so, it seeks to establish a comprehension of Theoderic's written output in much sharper contour than was hitherto possible. And it also relies on the new evidence yielded by this analysis to reconstruct in greater detail than before Theoderic's biographical and literary trajectory, and to to problematize his exceptionally mobile status, his unusual authorial profile, and the scope and contents of his works in light of the shifting contexts and commissioners that nourished his activities as an author. In doing all these things, this study raises new questions about authorship and literary networks in the decades on either side of the year 1000, and offers a new interdisciplinary approach to reconstructing these realities.
Digital Humanities 2017 Conference Abstracts, 2017
Interfaces: A Journal of Medieval European Literatures, 2021
This eighth issue of Interfaces contains two thematic clusters: the first cluster, entitled The A... more This eighth issue of Interfaces contains two thematic clusters: the first cluster, entitled The Astronomical Imagination in Literature through the Ages, is edited by Dale Kedwards; the second cluster, entitled Medieval Authorship and Canonicity in the Digital Age, is edited by Jeroen De Gussem and Jeroen Deploige.
Interfaces: A Journal of Medieval European Literatures, 2021
This article explores by aid of stylometric methods the collaborative authorship of the Vita Hild... more This article explores by aid of stylometric methods the collaborative authorship of the Vita Hildegardis, Hildegard of Bingen's (auto-?)biography. Both Hildegard and her biographers gradually contributed to the text in the course of the last years of Hildegard's life, and it was posthumously completed in the mid-1180s by end redactor Theoderic of Echternach. In between these termini a quo and ante quem the work was allegedly taken up but left unfinished by secretaries Godfrey of Disibodenberg and Guibert of Gembloux. In light of the fact that the Vita is an indispensable source in gaining historical knowledge on Hildegard's life, the question has often been raised whether the Life of Hildegard is – by dint of contributions by multiple stakeholders – a larger-than-life depiction of the visionary's life course. Specifically the 'autobiographical' passages included in the Vita, in which Hildegard is allegedly cited directly and is taken to recount biographical i...
Interfaces: A Journal of Medieval European Literatures, 2021
Jeroen Deploige and Jeroen De Gussem introduce Cluster 2 of Interfaces 8, on the topic of Medieva... more Jeroen Deploige and Jeroen De Gussem introduce Cluster 2 of Interfaces 8, on the topic of Medieval Authorship and Canonicity in the Digital Age.
Proceedings of the Workshop on Stylistic Variation, 2017
Parergon, 2019
By combining the methods of distant reading (computational stylistics) and close reading, the aut... more By combining the methods of distant reading (computational stylistics) and close reading, the authors discuss the development of language and thought in Hildegard of Bingen's visionary works (Sciuias, Liber uite meritorum and Liber diuinorum operum). The visionary trilogy, although written over the course of three decades, raises the impression of a monolithic and seemingly unchanging voice. Moving beyond this impression, the interdisciplinary analysis presented here reveals that the trilogy exhibits interesting differences at the word level which cannot simply be explained through external historical circumstances (e.g. manuscript transmission or different secretaries). Instead, the results raise pertinent questions regarding the trilogy's internal development in didactic method, style, and philosophy. I. The Authorship of Hildegard of Bingen Hildegard of Bingen's (1098-1179) major visionary works Sciuias (c. 1141-51), Liber uite meritorum (c. 1159-64) and Liber diuinorum operum (finished c. 1174) have been said to form an 'organic unity', 1 a tripartite magnum opus bound by strong conceptual, generic, and formal ties. 2 This is emphasized by the structure 1
Digital Humanities Conference, 2017
Although the past few decades of medieval studies have witnessed some renewed interest in the col... more Although the past few decades of medieval studies have witnessed some renewed interest in the collaborative process by which medieval Latin prose was composed, such interest has nevertheless remained all too scant, and only few solutions have been offered to cope with the difficulties that rise in cases of dubious authorship. Whereas it has been rightly acknowledged that scribes, notaries, and secretaries should be regarded not merely as instrumental in the literary process, but as active participants in the composition process who have left a considerable impact on the image and style of the dictator 1 and on the materialization and dissemination of the text, 2 this acknowledgement has nevertheless been accompanied by difficulties Speculum 92/S1 (October 2017).
Full text open access (UGent site) >> https://biblio.ugent.be/publication/8634997/f... more Full text open access (UGent site) >> https://biblio.ugent.be/publication/8634997/file/8634998 This interdisciplinary PhD thesis, abridging the computational analysis of texts with medieval cultural history and literary studies, treats the collaborative aspect of twelfth-century Latin literature by applying computional stylistics, a methodology which allows to make a statistically founded assessment of disputed texts’ authorship(s) through the automatic detection of textual writing patterns. Five case studies of twelfth-century writing partnerships in Latin are investigated, in which sensitive questions surrounding authority, synergy and gender take a prominent place. These case studies involve Bernard of Clairvaux and his secretary Nicholas of Montiéramey († 1176/8), Elisabeth of Schönau (1129–1164/5) and her brother Ekbert († 1184), Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179) and her biographers, Suger of Saint-Denis (1080/1–1151) and his entourage, and the renowned twelfth-century lovers and correspondents Heloise of Argenteuil († 1164) and Peter Abelard (1079–1142). The aim is to contribute to and challenge the predominant historical and literary paradigms by which medieval authorship are studied, and allow to formulate new cultural-historical questions. Thereby the usual application of stylometric methods is extended beyond mere authorship attribution, and the practical and theoretical usefulness of computational stylistics as a new model for the analysis of medieval Latin authorship is assessed. This thesis’s most important hypothesis is that computational stylistics provides a more accurate and objective means for capturing the ‘distributionality’ of twelfth-century authorship.
J. Data Min. Digit. Humanit., 2017
In this paper we consider two sequence tagging tasks for medieval Latin: part-of-speech tagging a... more In this paper we consider two sequence tagging tasks for medieval Latin: part-of-speech tagging and lemmatization. These are both basic, yet foundational preprocessing steps in applications such as text re-use detection. Nevertheless, they are generally complicated by the considerable orthographic variation which is typical of medieval Latin. In Digital Classics, these tasks are traditionally solved in a (i) cascaded and (ii) lexicon-dependent fashion. For example, a lexicon is used to generate all the potential lemma-tag pairs for a token, and next, a context-aware PoS-tagger is used to select the most appropriate tag-lemma pair. Apart from the problems with out-of-lexicon items, error percolation is a major downside of such approaches. In this paper we explore the possibility to elegantly solve these tasks using a single, integrated approach. For this, we make use of a layered neural network architecture from the field of deep representation learning.
This article means to give the reoccurrence of animal imagery in Statius’ Thebaid a satisfying, l... more This article means to give the reoccurrence of animal imagery in Statius’ Thebaid a satisfying, literary interpretation. Instead of denouncing the poet’s imitation of epic predecessors, we try to uncover his own distinctive voice. It is our argument that in the Thebaid the presence of animal imagery is connected to the transgression of gender-specific qualities or expectations. For men this means the corruption of male virtus, and for women the denunciation of their motherly role and a rebellious infringement of the text. Ultimately, the destabilization of gender boundaries through animal imagery can establish a convergence of the male and female realm, causing the animal imagery to become quite literally a “common place” for man and woman.
Speculum
Although the past few decades of medieval studies have witnessed some renewed interest in the col... more Although the past few decades of medieval studies have witnessed some renewed interest in the collaborative process by which medieval Latin prose was composed, such interest has nevertheless remained all too scant, and only few solutions have been offered to cope with the difficulties that rise in cases of dubious authorship. Whereas it has been rightly acknowledged that scribes, notaries, and secretaries should be regarded not merely as instrumental in the literary process, but as active participants in the composition process who have left a considerable impact on the image and style of the dictator 1 and on the materialization and dissemination of the text, 2 this acknowledgement has nevertheless been accompanied by difficulties Speculum 92/S1 (October 2017).
Interfaces 8, 2021
Introduction by Deploige and De Gussem to the special cluster of Interfaces 8, edited by the auth... more Introduction by Deploige and De Gussem to the special cluster of Interfaces 8, edited by the authors of this article, which contains a selection of contributions that grew out of the conference “The Medieval Literary Canon in the Digital Age,” held at Ghent University on 17–18 September 2018. The conference was organised by Mike Kestemont, Wim Verbaal and the authors of this introduction, in collaboration with the Henri Pirenne Institute for Medieval Studies at Ghent University, the international research network RELICS (Researchers of European Literary Identities, Cosmopolitanism and the Schools), and the research community “Digital Humanities Flanders” (DHu.f).
Interfaces 8, 2021
This article explores by aid of stylometric methods the collaborative authorship of the Vita Hild... more This article explores by aid of stylometric methods the collaborative authorship of the Vita Hildegardis, Hildegard of Bingen’s (auto-?)biography. Both Hildegard and her biographers gradually contributed to the text in the course of the last years of Hildegard’s life, and it was posthumously completed in the mid-1180s by end redactor Theoderic of Echternach. In between these termini a quo and ante quem the work was allegedly taken up but left unfinished by secretaries Godfrey of Disibodenberg and Guibert of Gembloux. In light of the fact that the Vita is an indispensable source in gaining historical knowledge on Hildegard’s life, the question has often been raised whether the Life of Hildegard is – by dint of contributions by multiple stakeholders – a larger-than-life depiction of the visionary’s life course. Specifically the ‘autobiographical’ passages included in the Vita, in which Hildegard is allegedly cited directly and is taken to recount biographical information in the first-person singular, have been approached with suspicion. By applying state-of-the-art computational methods for the automatic detection of writing style (stylometry), the delicate questions of authenticity and collaborative authorship of this (auto?)hagiographical text are addressed.
EOS Psyche&Brein Special - Identiteit, 2020
Hebben wij het hart op de tong? Computers suggereren van wel. Slimme algoritmen detecteren onze p... more Hebben wij het hart op de tong? Computers suggereren van wel. Slimme algoritmen detecteren onze persoonlijkheid op basis van onze taal. Taal is persoonlijk, dat tonen computers zwart op wit aan. Algoritmen kunnen bepaalde stijl-keuzes en zinswendingen die jou of mij typeren met grote precisie detecteren in een tekst, en die aan de rechtmatige auteur toekennen. Die patronen vormen samen een soort 'stilistische vingerafdruk.' Net zoals elke vingertop een eigen lijnenpatroon heeft dat een inbreker kan verraden, heeft elke tekst een stijl die de ware auteur ontmaskert.
De Standaard, 2020
Article in the Belgian national newspaper De Standaard (2 October 2020) on the results of the res... more Article in the Belgian national newspaper De Standaard (2 October 2020) on the results of the research project "Collaborative Authorship in Twelfth-Century Latin Literature. A Stylometric Approach to Gender, Synergy and Authority" (UGent - UA, PhD Jeroen De Gussem, supervised by Jeroen Deploige, Wim Verbaal and Mike Kestemont).
ABSTRACT — "Ze hebben echt bestaan. En hadden ze gekund, dan hadden ze elkaar van pure passie werkelijk opgegeten. Maar de prachtige brieven die we van het iconische liefdespaar Abélard en Héloïse hebben, zijn wellicht minder authentiek."
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ABSTRACT — "That they have existed is fact. And if they had not been prevented, they would have passionately devoured one another. But the beautiful letters of the iconic lovers Abelard and Heloise is probably less authentic" [my translation].
EOS Wetenschap, 2020
De liefdesbrieven tussen Héloïse en Abélard zijn een van de best
bewaarde geheimen van onze gesch... more De liefdesbrieven tussen Héloïse en Abélard zijn een van de best
bewaarde geheimen van onze geschiedenis. Al decennialang
breken specialisten het hoofd over wie ze schreef. Gewapend met
taalalgoritmes kon Jeroen De Gussem de ware auteur van de fascinerende
correspondentie ontmaskeren.
Parergon 36.1, 2019
By combining the methods of distant reading (computational stylistics) and close reading, the aut... more By combining the methods of distant reading (computational stylistics) and close reading, the authors discuss the development of language and thought in Hildegard of Bingen’s visionary works (Sciuias, Liber uite meritorum and Liber diuinorum operum). The visionary trilogy, although written over the course of three decades, raises the impression of a monolithic and seemingly unchanging voice. Moving beyond this impression, the interdisciplinary analysis presented here reveals that the trilogy exhibits interesting differences at the word level which cannot simply be explained through external historical circumstances (e.g. manuscript transmission or different secretaries). Instead, the results raise pertinent questions regarding the trilogy’s internal development in didactic method, style, and philosophy.
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Videos by Jeroen De Gussem
Papers by Jeroen De Gussem
ABSTRACT — "Ze hebben echt bestaan. En hadden ze gekund, dan hadden ze elkaar van pure passie werkelijk opgegeten. Maar de prachtige brieven die we van het iconische liefdespaar Abélard en Héloïse hebben, zijn wellicht minder authentiek."
----
ABSTRACT — "That they have existed is fact. And if they had not been prevented, they would have passionately devoured one another. But the beautiful letters of the iconic lovers Abelard and Heloise is probably less authentic" [my translation].
bewaarde geheimen van onze geschiedenis. Al decennialang
breken specialisten het hoofd over wie ze schreef. Gewapend met
taalalgoritmes kon Jeroen De Gussem de ware auteur van de fascinerende
correspondentie ontmaskeren.
ABSTRACT — "Ze hebben echt bestaan. En hadden ze gekund, dan hadden ze elkaar van pure passie werkelijk opgegeten. Maar de prachtige brieven die we van het iconische liefdespaar Abélard en Héloïse hebben, zijn wellicht minder authentiek."
----
ABSTRACT — "That they have existed is fact. And if they had not been prevented, they would have passionately devoured one another. But the beautiful letters of the iconic lovers Abelard and Heloise is probably less authentic" [my translation].
bewaarde geheimen van onze geschiedenis. Al decennialang
breken specialisten het hoofd over wie ze schreef. Gewapend met
taalalgoritmes kon Jeroen De Gussem de ware auteur van de fascinerende
correspondentie ontmaskeren.
In meandering through such questions, it becomes clear that – although they seem very different at the outset – the “exalted expert” from historical text editing and literary theory is but little different to the “exact experiment”. Yet, both methods serve a distinctive purpose and deserve their respective position within literary theory.
Stylometry, a method to segregate writing styles with computer algorithms and attribute works of disputed authorship, is used to shed new light on the famous case of the contested literary collaboration between the twelfth-century lovers Heloise and Abelard (the Letter Collection and the Epistolae duorum amantium). The Latin writings associated with the abbess of the Paraclete and the Parisian philosopher have for centuries been subjected to fierce discussions about authorship and authenticity. Due to a dire lack of historical information and material sources, the two letter exchanges currently ascribed to the twelfth-century lovers still raise numerous questions concerning their provenance, dating and intention. The chapter explores the literary and historical-material arguments that have caused scholarly debate on Heloise and Abelard to spread like wildfire. In addition, new findings on the much-debated works are presented, informed by computer-scientific arguments.
Jeroen De Gussem, "Love to the Letter: Heloise and Abelard," in: “Collaborative Authorship in Twelfth-Century Latin Literature. A Stylometric Approach to Gender, Synergy and Authority,” (PhD diss., Ghent University and University of Antwerp, 2019): 235–280.
This interdisciplinary PhD thesis, abridging the computational analysis of texts with medieval cultural history and literary studies, treats the collaborative aspect of twelfth-century Latin literature by applying computional stylistics, a methodology which allows to make a statistically founded assessment of disputed texts’ authorship(s) through the automatic detection of textual writing patterns. Five case studies of twelfth-century writing partnerships in Latin are investigated, in which sensitive questions surrounding authority, synergy and gender take a prominent place. These case studies involve Bernard of Clairvaux and his secretary Nicholas of Montiéramey († 1176/8), Elisabeth of Schönau (1129–1164/5) and her brother Ekbert († 1184), Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179) and her biographers, Suger of Saint-Denis (1080/1–1151) and his entourage, and the renowned twelfth-century lovers and correspondents Heloise of Argenteuil († 1164) and Peter Abelard (1079–1142).
The aim is to contribute to and challenge the predominant historical and literary paradigms by which medieval authorship are studied, and allow to formulate new cultural-historical questions. Thereby the usual application of stylometric methods is extended beyond mere authorship attribution, and the practical and theoretical usefulness of computational stylistics as a new model for the analysis of medieval Latin authorship is assessed. This thesis’s most important hypothesis is that computational stylistics provides a more accurate and objective means for capturing the ‘distributionality’ of twelfth-century authorship.