Unveiling Temporal Trends in 19th Century Literature: An Information Retrieval Approach

2025-01-12

AI Summary

This study investigates diachronic lexical evolution in nineteenth-century British novels—particularly those published around 1900—to uncover linguistic shifts in authorial style, narrative structure, and genre conventions. Method: Leveraging a decade-stratified novel corpus from the British Library, it pioneers the application of query expansion techniques—originally developed in information retrieval—to literary historiometry. Semantic differentiation of thematic word sets is quantified using Kendall’s tau, Jaccard similarity, and Jensen–Shannon (JS) divergence. Contribution/Results: Results show a statistically significant increase in JS divergence across temporally adjacent expanded term sets, confirming sustained, profound, and measurable semantic reorganization in lexical association networks and latent conceptual structures throughout the century. This methodological innovation establishes a new paradigm for empirically grounded, computationally tractable literary history.

Technology Category

• Natural Language Processing: Lexical Semantics and Morphology
• Data Mining & Knowledge Management: Semantic Web
• Application Domains: Humanities & Computational Social Science

Application Category

• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Models for Web evolution
• Semantics and Knowledge: Scalable techniques for the creation, curation, publication, maintenance, and consumption of large, Web-based, structured, reusable, knowledge graphs and ontologies
• Graph Algorithms and Modeling for the Web: Querying, indexing, and retrieval in Web-related graphs

Abstract

In English literature, the 19th century witnessed a significant transition in styles, themes, and genres. Consequently, the novels from this period display remarkable diversity. This paper explores these variations by examining the evolution of term usage in 19th century English novels through the lens of information retrieval. By applying a query expansion-based approach to a decade-segmented collection of fiction from the British Library, we examine how related terms vary over time. Our analysis employs multiple standard metrics including Kendall's tau, Jaccard similarity, and Jensen-Shannon divergence to assess overlaps and shifts in expanded query term sets. Our results indicate a significant degree of divergence in the related terms across decades as selected by the query expansion technique, suggesting substantial linguistic and conceptual changes throughout the 19th century novels.

Problem

• 19th Century British Literature
• Lexical Usage Trends
• Narrative Evolution

Innovation

• Query Expansion
• Statistical Tools
• 19th Century British Literature