Speaker: Vincent Sarbach-Pulicani
Affiliation: Université Côte d’Azur, Centre de la Méditerranée Moderne et Contemporaine, Campus Carlone, 06100 Nice, France
Title: Profiling Anonymous Authors in the Corsican Autonomist Press of the Interwar Period
Abstract: With the emergence of nationalism in the 19 th ~century came regionalist movements to assert and claim cultural particularities. Corsica fitted very well within this dynamic and even presented itself as a favourable location for the development of such ideas. The centralization of the state around a strong capital and the policies of assimilation of the indigenous populations on the border with France led certain players to defend these particularisms. It was in this context that the Corsican autonomist newspaper A Muvra was born in May 1920 in Paris, under the impetus of Petru and Matteu Rocca. For almost 19 years, hundreds of authors participated in the writing of this massive dialectal work. This paper presents the results of a research that aimed to carry out author profiling, i.e., to determine the style and subjects covered by an author. The goals of this study were to determine the identity behind certain authors and also to highlight the role pseudonyms played in the newspaper’s propaganda. We conducted authorship attribution to achieve the first objective before completing these analyses with topic modelling in order to meet the second one.