Literary DNA Tools
have been designed to make in-depth analyses of the style and formal grammatical elements contained in a textual corpus in order to extract its “Literary DNA” (L-DNA). The tools also do selective in-depth comparisons of L-DNAs of any group of texts, from the same or different authors, in order to reveal similarities and differences between selected authors or selected groups of authors.
L-DNA Extractor
This tool parses a corpus provided in digital format (.txt) in order to measure the numerical values of thousands of formal grammatical parameters and writing style elements. These parameters can be seen as “proteins” which form a gigantic macromolecule that is unique to each corpus: the “Corpus Literary DNA” ( CL-DNA for shorter notation) . Among these parameters, we have many that indicate how punctuation and the 8 parts of speech (noun, pronoun, adjective, determiner, verb, adverb, preposition, conjunction and interjection) are used in the corpus being analysed. But also, what type of sentences and paragraphs are written in the corpus, meaningful ratios of all of the above, levels of redundancy and repetition, complexity of the vocabulary and syntactic forms used, etc. Today’s version of the tool [20190818] extracts around 122,000 parameters, but the tool is in permanent evolution, extracting larger and larger DNA molecules with every improved new version of the L-DNA extractor tool.
L-DNA Comparator
This tool allows comparison of all the desired parameters of two or more L-DNAs, in order to measure similarities and differences. These groups of L-DNAs can be from the corpora of one author. In that case the comparison tool would be obtaining what we call “Author L-DNA” (or AL-DNA for shorter notation). If the group being compared is a collection of various authors with some common characteristics ( e.g., female writers from the second half of the 19th century who were raised in Ireland), then we talk about “Group L-DNA” (GL-DNA for shorter notation). The comparison tool will decide which CL-DNAs should be compared according to the comparison criteria that meets the objectives of each study. This means the comparison tool will select which specific corpora or types of corpora (e.g., novels, essays, plays, etc.) and authors or types of authors (e.g., raised in Australia, Protestant, born after 1950, etc.) from the pool of our existing CL-DNA database.
L-DNA GRAPHO maker
This tool creates graphical representations of the L-DNAs (of Corpus, Authors or Groups of corpora). These L-DNA “graphos” have a squared shape and are made of thousands of ordered colored pixels. The position, color and tint of each pixel has a meaning, according to the actual type of L-DNA parameter it represents, its measured or calculated value, the desired masking filters, and the type of L-DNA ( “C”,”A” or “G”) grapho selected.
