[Corpora-List] Is corpora of texts an object?

[Trevor Jenkins]

On 8 Oct 2012, at 19:03, "Angus B. Grieve-Smith" <grvsmth at panix.com> wrote:

>     We certainly have complete corpora of the widely published fictional works of Dickens and Hemingway.  Do we need to take Dickens' social observations into account?  Maybe, maybe not.  Completeness and representativeness all depend on your purpose.

Indeed, if one is analysing his fictional oeuvre then the existence of the journals doesn't matter … or does it? He addresses issues in those journal articles that re-appear in his fiction. Later completeness may invalidate conclusions drawn from representativeness. Or not.

>     Yuri asked about homogeneity.  What are the implications for "more homogeneous" versus "less homogeneous"?  Could it just mean that Dickens had more careful (or scrupulous, rigid, or anal-retentive) editors than Hemingway?  I think "homogeneous" is too vague a term to be useful without further context.

Can't talk about Hemingway but there's an anecdote, repeated in some of the two century retrospective programmes on TV and radio, that Dickens' own handwriting was so awful that only the best typesetters could cope with it. Suggestion is he did this deliberately as a way of making sure the men setting his text knew what they were doing.

Regards, Trevor.

<>< Re: deemed!


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