Good Omens: A Collaborative Authorship Study

:speech_balloon: Speaker: Leonardo Grotti, Mona Allaert and Patrick Quick

:classical_building: Affiliation: Universiteit Antwerpen, Faculty of Arts, Prinsstraat 13, B-2000, Antwerp

Title:

Abstract: Good Omens is a collaborative novel written by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman. Rising interest in the book, amplified by the success of the recent screen adaptation, has aroused curiosity regarding its realization. We use Rolling Delta and Rolling Classify to detect stylistic signals from each author as these methods reveal authorial takeovers. The same techniques are applied to compare the screenplay of the show to the novel. The results indicate that Good Omens resembles Pratchett’s work more closely. The screenplay is correctly attributed to Gaiman, its sole author, and the comparison reveals that Gaiman may have relied less on the source material over the course of the narrative arc.

:newspaper: Link to paper

:file_folder:

Hi there!
Sadly didn’t have an opportunity to talk to you more during the conference, but about the 6 texts limitation in rolling.delta / rolling.classify: can you maybe open an issue on stylo github? I don’t think it supposed to be there by design.
GitHub - computationalstylistics/stylo: R package for stylometric analyses
One possible workaround would be merging novels in fewer documents and then pulling random samples from them? It can eliminate the factor of individual texts, potentially allowing to sample authorial style more broadly.