# On Burgundian (di)vine orators and other impostors: Stylometry of Late Medieval Rhetoricians

Jean-Baptiste Camps, Benedetta Salvati

► To cite this version:

Jean-Baptiste Camps, Benedetta Salvati. On Burgundian (di)vine orators and other impostors: Stylometry of Late Medieval Rhetoricians. Diogital Humanities 2023: Collaboration as an Opportunity, Graz, 2023, 10.5281/zenodo.8210808. [https://enc.hal.science/hal-04532183](https://enc.hal.science/hal-04532183)

HAL Id: hal-04532183

https://enc.hal.science/hal-04532183

Submitted on 4 Apr 2024

HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access
archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci-
entific research documents, whether they are pub-
lished or not. The documents may come from
teaching and research institutions in France or
abroad, or from public or private research centers.

L'archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est
destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents
scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non,
émanant des établissements d'enseignement et de
recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires
publics ou privés.

<figure><img src="image_1.png" /></figure>

Distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
# On Burgundian (di)vine orators and other impostors: Stylometry of Late Medieval Rhetoricians

## Camps, Jean-Baptiste

jean-baptiste.camps@chartes.psl.eu

École nationale des chartes | Université PSL, France

## Salvati, Benedetta

benedetta.salvati@chartes.psl.eu

École nationale des chartes | Université PSL, France; Université de Lausanne, Suisse

## Introduction

The attribution of medieval texts poses specific challenges. Many texts are anonymous or of dubious authorship. Very often, there is no known candidate for the authorship of a given text. In many other cases, there is only one single known candidate (or only one that can actually be tested), and the task becomes one of authorship verification. Widespread in the Middle Ages, anonymity is the hallmark of heraldic literature. Only rarely indeed do heralds claim ownership over their works, and, when they do, they generally use a pseudonym (Couhault 2020), which makes it difficult to identify the authors.

This paper intends to answer the question of whether or not the two pieces of topical poetry, *Le blazon des armes de Lalaing* (1509), and *L'epitaphe de Jehan de Luxembourg* (1508-1509 ca.), attested in the MS Paris, BnF, fr. 5229, at the folios 143r-144v and 150r-v, undoubtedly two works of an herald of arms, can be ascribed to Nicaise Ladam, *chroniqueur-poète* and herald of arms of the Burgundian-Habsburgs' House. The first poem is signed by *Luxembourg le herault*, while the running title of the second one attributes the epitaph to the *Songeur de Bapasmes*, both known to be the pen names of Nicaise (Ladam 1975; Lemaire and Tourneux 2001; Couhault 2020), who was born in Bapaume in 1465. In order to compare the results on those two pieces, we include a third anonymous one, *Or a permis la divine puissance* (1524-1546 ca.), for which there are no suspicions of Ladam's authorship.

## Preparing the corpus

Writing among heralds is very poorly recorded. Not many French-speaking officers apart from Ladam seem indeed to have practised rhymed eloquence, which has been a major constraint in establishing our corpus. In the absence of documentation, we therefore gave priority to Burgundian contemporary authors, such as J. Molinet, *indiciaire* and official historiographer of the dukes of Burgundy (Devaux 1996; Frieden 2013), whose dialect and poetic institutes could correspond to the ones of the Anonymous of MS 5229, as well as French rhetoricians, namely G. Crétin, who has practised different forms of topical writing, including funeral la-

mentation and eulogy, genres to which the two poems mentioned above belong.

The texts included in the corpus have been acquired using handwritten text recognition (cer of 2.26% on test set) and *ocr*, and have then been carefully corrected and critically edited. As for the Ladam's ones, they have been edited by B. Salvati, as a part of her digital scholarly edition of *Chronique abrégée* (1488-1546) (Salvati 2020); the other ones have been taken from the critical reference editions, which we later emended where necessary (see Table 3 in appendix). We removed inserts in prose or in Latin from the texts.

## Method

Due to manuscript based transmission, authorial idiolect in the documents is mixed with the linguistic particularities of the successive scribes. It is particularly true of spelling, probably the less stable element in the tradition. For this reason, we experiment not only with traditional stylometric features such as affixes (Sapkota et al. 2015), but we also use lemmatised function words and part-of-speech trigrams (Camps, Clérice, and Pinche 2021).

Dealing with short texts (as is often the case with occasional poetry) of variable lengths is also an issue to which there are no convenient solutions. To have a minimum sample size of 1000 words, we aggregate all poems of the same author, and then take samples of 1000 words each.

We use two different type of supervised analyses:

* Linear support-vector machines, trained to recognise the style of each author. To handle the differences in training corpus size, we use downsampling and class weights (Lemaître, Noügueira, and Aridas 2017);

* a generalised-impostors method (Koppel and Winter 2014; Kestemont et al. 2016), following the implementation provided by M. Eder (Eder, Rybicki, and Kestemont 2016).

<table><caption>**Table 1.** F1 Score for leave-one-out evaluation of the SVM models for each feature type</caption><thead><tr><th>Author</th><th>affixes</th><th>lemma (full)</th><th>lemma (fw)</th><th>POS</th><th>Support</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>Cretin</td><td>1.00</td><td>1.00</td><td>0.83</td><td>0.94</td><td>16</td></tr><tr><td>Ladam</td><td>0.99</td><td>0.99</td><td>0.94</td><td>0.96</td><td>37</td></tr><tr><td>Molinet</td><td>0.96</td><td>0.96</td><td>0.83</td><td>0.96</td><td>12</td></tr><tr><td>macro av.</td><td>0.98</td><td>0.98</td><td>0.87</td><td>0.95</td><td></td></tr><tr><td>weighted av.</td><td>0.98</td><td>0.98</td><td>0.90</td><td>0.95</td><td></td></tr></tbody></table>

All in all, affixes and lemma, closely followed by POS, seem to be the most efficient features, when used in isolation. If only the score is considered, they seem like the natural choice, but, when we look at the features with the highest coefficients in the classification models, the results are somewhat different (fig. 1). Some of them, such as the word ending y after u, seem indeed more likely to indicate copyists' scribal habits, rather than authorial style features.

Such bias also contaminates the POS: for instance, the rarer spelling for the definite article *ung*, is erroneously interpreted by the tagger as demonstrative, causing biased pseudo-features. In addition, lemmas themselves seem to retain a lot of thematic and generic features. For instance, the sting (*dart*), frequently associated to the representations of Death in funeral poetry, to which the major part of Ladam's chosen pieces belong, or the overuse of the second-person pronoun (*tu*).

For these reasons, selected function words, though less performing, seem like the less biased feature (the other, harder to imple-
# On Burgundian (di)vine orators and other impostors: Stylometry of Late Medieval Rhetoricians

## Camps, Jean-Baptiste

jean-baptiste.camps@chartes.psl.eu

École nationale des chartes | Université PSL, France

## Salvati, Benedetta

benedetta.salvati@chartes.psl.eu

École nationale des chartes | Université PSL, France; Université de Lausanne, Suisse

## Introduction

The attribution of medieval texts poses specific challenges. Many texts are anonymous or of dubious authorship. Very often, there is no known candidate for the authorship of a given text. In many other cases, there is only one single known candidate (or only one that can actually be tested), and the task becomes one of authorship verification. Widespread in the Middle Ages, anonymity is the hallmark of heraldic literature. Only rarely indeed do heralds claim ownership over their works, and, when they do, they generally use a pseudonym (Couhault 2020), which makes it difficult to identify the authors.

This paper intends to answer the question of whether or not the two pieces of topical poetry, *Le blazon des armes de Lalaing* (1509), and *L'epitaphe de Jehan de Luxembourg* (1508-1509 ca.), attested in the MS Paris, BnF, fr. 5229, at the folios 143r-144v and 150r-v, undoubtedly two works of an herald of arms, can be ascribed to Nicaise Ladam, *chroniqueur-poète* and herald of arms of the Burgundian-Habsburgs' House. The first poem is signed by *Luxembourg le herault*, while the running title of the second one attributes the epitaph to the *Songeur de Bapasmes*, both known to be the pen names of Nicaise (Ladam 1975; Lemaire and Tourneux 2001; Couhault 2020), who was born in Bapaume in 1465. In order to compare the results on those two pieces, we include a third anonymous one, *Or a permis la divine puissance* (1524-1546 ca.), for which there are no suspicions of Ladam's authorship.

## Preparing the corpus

Writing among heralds is very poorly recorded. Not many French-speaking officers apart from Ladam seem indeed to have practised rhymed eloquence, which has been a major constraint in establishing our corpus. In the absence of documentation, we therefore gave priority to Burgundian contemporary authors, such as J. Molinet, *indiciaire* and official historiographer of the dukes of Burgundy (Devaux 1996; Frieden 2013), whose dialect and poetic institutes could correspond to the ones of the Anonymous of MS 5229, as well as French rhetoricians, namely G. Crétin, who has practised different forms of topical writing, including funeral la-

mentation and eulogy, genres to which the two poems mentioned above belong.

The texts included in the corpus have been acquired using handwritten text recognition (cer of 2.26% on test set) and *ocr*, and have then been carefully corrected and critically edited. As for the Ladam's ones, they have been edited by B. Salvati, as a part of her digital scholarly edition of *Chronique abrégée* (1488-1546) (Salvati 2020); the other ones have been taken from the critical reference editions, which we later emended where necessary (see Table 3 in appendix). We removed inserts in prose or in Latin from the texts.

## Method

Due to manuscript based transmission, authorial idiolect in the documents is mixed with the linguistic particularities of the successive scribes. It is particularly true of spelling, probably the less stable element in the tradition. For this reason, we experiment not only with traditional stylometric features such as affixes (Sapkota et al. 2015), but we also use lemmatised function words and part-of-speech trigrams (Camps, Clérice, and Pinche 2021).

Dealing with short texts (as is often the case with occasional poetry) of variable lengths is also an issue to which there are no convenient solutions. To have a minimum sample size of 1000 words, we aggregate all poems of the same author, and then take samples of 1000 words each.

We use two different type of supervised analyses:

* Linear support-vector machines, trained to recognise the style of each author. To handle the differences in training corpus size, we use downsampling and class weights (Lemaître, Noügueira, and Aridas 2017);

* a generalised-impostors method (Koppel and Winter 2014; Kestemont et al. 2016), following the implementation provided by M. Eder (Eder, Rybicki, and Kestemont 2016).

<table><caption>**Table 1.** F1 Score for leave-one-out evaluation of the SVM models for each feature type</caption><thead><tr><th>Author</th><th>affixes</th><th>lemma (full)</th><th>lemma (fw)</th><th>POS</th><th>Support</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>Cretin</td><td>1.00</td><td>1.00</td><td>0.83</td><td>0.94</td><td>16</td></tr><tr><td>Ladam</td><td>0.99</td><td>0.99</td><td>0.94</td><td>0.96</td><td>37</td></tr><tr><td>Molinet</td><td>0.96</td><td>0.96</td><td>0.83</td><td>0.96</td><td>12</td></tr><tr><td>macro av.</td><td>0.98</td><td>0.98</td><td>0.87</td><td>0.95</td><td></td></tr><tr><td>weighted av.</td><td>0.98</td><td>0.98</td><td>0.90</td><td>0.95</td><td></td></tr></tbody></table>

All in all, affixes and lemma, closely followed by POS, seem to be the most efficient features, when used in isolation. If only the score is considered, they seem like the natural choice, but, when we look at the features with the highest coefficients in the classification models, the results are somewhat different (fig. 1). Some of them, such as the word ending *y* after *u*, seem indeed more likely to indicate copyists' scribal habits, rather than authorial style features.

Such bias also contaminates the POS: for instance, the rarer spelling for the definite article *ung*, is erroneously interpreted by the tagger as demonstrative, causing biased pseudo-features. In addition, lemmas themselves seem to retain a lot of thematic and generic features. For instance, the sting (*dart*), frequently associated to the representations of Death in funeral poetry, to which the major part of Ladam's chosen pieces belong, or the overuse of the second-person pronoun (*tu*).

For these reasons, selected function words, though less performing, seem like the less biased feature (the other, harder to imple-
ment, alternative would be to correct annotation and perform spel-
ling normalisation). We decide to continue on using only function
words.

Globally, the imbalance of the training corpus is a substantial
obstacle, and the problem is to some extent an open set ques-
tion, which makes the impostors approach an interesting alterna-
tive. The impostors method was first optimised through the proce-
dure implemented by (Eder, Rybicki, and Kestemont 2016). In the
leave-one-out training, the range of unreliable values were contai-
ned between 0.28 and 0.55.

<figure><img src="image_1.png" /></figure>

<figure><img src="image_2.png" /><figcaption>Figure 1: Coefficients for the Ladam models based on affixes, lemmas, POS 3-grams as well as lemmatised function words</figcaption></figure>

Results and discussion

<table><caption>**Table 2:** Coefficients of the pieces to be attributed based on the SVM models (value above 0 in bold), and impostors method (value above P2 are in bold; du-bious values between P1 and P2 in italics))</caption><thead><tr><th></th><th>Cretin</th><th>Ladam</th><th>Molinet</th><th>SVM<br>pred</th><th>Cretin</th><th>Ladam</th><th>Molinet</th><th>Impost.<br>pred</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>Or a...</td><td>-0.61</td><td>0.04</td><td>-0.48</td><td>Ladam?</td><td>0.55</td><td>0.65</td><td>0.24</td><td>Contra-<br>dictory</td></tr><tr><td>Blazon</td><td>-0.39</td><td>-0.38</td><td>-0.29</td><td>None</td><td>0.40</td><td>0.83</td><td>0.32</td><td>Ladam?</td></tr><tr><td>Epitaphe</td><td>-0.73</td><td>0.43</td><td>-0.68</td><td>Ladam</td><td>0.39</td><td>0.79</td><td>0.06</td><td>Ladam?</td></tr></tbody></table>
ment, alternative would be to correct annotation and perform spel-
ling normalisation). We decide to continue on using only function
words.

Globally, the imbalance of the training corpus is a substantial
obstacle, and the problem is to some extent an open set ques-
tion, which makes the impostors approach an interesting alterna-
tive. The impostors method was first optimised through the proce-
dure implemented by (Eder, Rybicki, and Kestemont 2016). In the
leave-one-out training, the range of unreliable values were contai-
ned between 0.28 and 0.55.

<figure><img src="image_2.png" /></figure>

<figure><img src="image_3.png" /><figcaption>Figure 1: Coefficients for the Ladam models based on affixes, lemmas, POS 3-grams as well as lemmatised function words</figcaption></figure>

Results and discussion

<table><caption>**Table 2:** Coefficients of the pieces to be attributed based on the SVM models (value above 0 in bold), and impostors method (value above P2 are in bold; du-bious values between P1 and P2 in italics))</caption><thead><tr><th></th><th>Cretin</th><th>Ladam</th><th>Molinet</th><th>SVM<br>pred</th><th>Cretin</th><th>Ladam</th><th>Molinet</th><th>Impost.<br>pred</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>Or a...</td><td>-0.61</td><td>0.04</td><td>-0.48</td><td>Ladam?</td><td>0.55</td><td>0.65</td><td>0.24</td><td>Contra-<br>dictory</td></tr><tr><td>Blazon</td><td>-0.39</td><td>-0.38</td><td>-0.29</td><td>None</td><td>0.40</td><td>0.83</td><td>0.32</td><td>Ladam?</td></tr><tr><td>Epitaphe</td><td>-0.73</td><td>0.43</td><td>-0.68</td><td>Ladam</td><td>0.39</td><td>0.79</td><td>0.06</td><td>Ladam?</td></tr></tbody></table>
If Ladam is the most likely candidate inside the set for the *Blazon* and *Epitaphe*, the results are a bit more conclusive regarding the second. Could he be the author of only this piece? Nonetheless, the results are to be taken with caution, as the scores are partially contradictory between themselves. Current results make it likely that *Or a...* is indeed not of Ladam, and maybe even the *Blazon*, whose style seem somewhere between the three authors but inside the style of neither of them.

## Future research

To avoid scribal biases, even when a normalisation such as lemmatisation is performed, it will be necessary to correct annotation errors. Our results tend indeed to show that these errors are not random and uniform, but are subject to biases when, for instance, a rare scribal spelling is encountered by the lemmatiser, creating issues in attribution. In itself, automated normalisation might not be sufficient to handle this.

Secondly, given the partially contradictory results of the two methods, it will be necessary to improve their results by enriching the dataset. For the impostors' method, the inclusion of more imposters is necessary to reach a really 'open set' approach. For the SVM, the addition of more samples, or, of additional features seem necessary. That's why, in the future, we plan to also integrate features of the poetic style, who sometimes have been shown to be the best performing feature for the analysis of poetry (Plecháč, Boßenhausen, and Hammerich 2018). In particular, the alternation of verses of varying length, the schema of verse-ending rhymes, the presence of internal rhymes and the place of caesura are features worthy of encoding and analysing, especially since some patterns are already suspected to be strong authorial markers (for instance, the presence of internal rhymes is suspected to be a feature of Ladam's style).

## Data and materials availability

Supervised analyses were made with SuperStyl (https://github.com/SupervisedStylometry/SuperStyl/) and the impostors' implementation is based on Stylo R package.
If Ladam is the most likely candidate inside the set for the *Blazon* and *Epitaphe*, the results are a bit more conclusive regarding the second. Could he be the author of only this piece? Nonetheless, the results are to be taken with caution, as the scores are partially contradictory between themselves. Current results make it likely that *Or a...* is indeed not of Ladam, and maybe even the *Blazon*, whose style seem somewhere between the three authors but inside the style of neither of them.

## Future research

To avoid scribal biases, even when a normalisation such as lemmatisation is performed, it will be necessary to correct annotation errors. Our results tend indeed to show that these errors are not random and uniform, but are subject to biases when, for instance, a rare scribal spelling is encountered by the lemmatiser, creating issues in attribution. In itself, automated normalisation might not be sufficient to handle this.

Secondly, given the partially contradictory results of the two methods, it will be necessary to improve their results by enriching the dataset. For the impostors' method, the inclusion of more imposters is necessary to reach a really 'open set' approach. For the SVM, the addition of more samples, or, of additional features seem necessary. That's why, in the future, we plan to also integrate features of the poetic style, who sometimes have been shown to be the best performing feature for the analysis of poetry (Plecháč, Boßenhausen, and Hammerich 2018). In particular, the alternation of verses of varying length, the schema of verse-ending rhymes, the presence of internal rhymes and the place of caesura are features worthy of encoding and analysing, especially since some patterns are already suspected to be strong authorial markers (for instance, the presence of internal rhymes is suspected to be a feature of Ladam's style).

## Data and materials availability

Supervised analyses were made with SuperStyl (https://github.com/SupervisedStylometry/SuperStyl/) and the impostors' implementation is based on *Stylo* R package.
Appendix: Composition of the corpus

<table><caption>Table 3: List of the texts of the corpus</caption><thead><tr><th>Author</th><th>Genre</th><th>Date</th><th>Title</th><th>Nb. words</th><th>Source</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>Crétin</td><td>lament</td><td>ca. 1496</td><td>Deploration sur le trepas de feu Okegan</td><td>2847</td><td>(Crétin 1864)</td></tr><tr><td>Crétin</td><td>lament</td><td>3901</td><td>Plainte sur le trespas de messire Guillaume de Byssipat</td><td>3901</td><td>(Cretin 1932)</td></tr><tr><td>Crétin</td><td>lament</td><td>1335</td><td>Plainte sur le trepas de Johan Braconnier</td><td>1335</td><td>(Cretin 1932)</td></tr><tr><td>Crétin</td><td>lament</td><td>7763</td><td>L'apparition du Mareschal sans reproche</td><td>7763</td><td>(Cretin 1932)</td></tr><tr><td>Crétin</td><td>occasional poem</td><td>1498-1501</td><td>La Rescription des femmes de Paris</td><td>153</td><td></td></tr><tr><td>Crétin</td><td>epistle</td><td>1515</td><td>Ad illustrissimum seigneur monseigneur Franciscum valescorum</td><td>680</td><td></td></tr><tr><td>Crétin</td><td>rhymed chronicle</td><td>1515-25</td><td>Chronique françoise</td><td>443</td><td></td></tr><tr><td>Ladam</td><td>lament</td><td>1492</td><td>Le Doeul d'Arras</td><td>509</td><td>(Salvati 2020)</td></tr><tr><td>Ladam</td><td>lament</td><td>1492</td><td>Rescription aux Allemantz</td><td>319</td><td>(Salvati 2020)</td></tr><tr><td>Ladam</td><td>lament</td><td>1494</td><td>L'Epytappe de Philippes de Criefvecoeur</td><td>2073</td><td>(Salvati 2020)</td></tr><tr><td>Ladam</td><td>prayer poem</td><td>1495</td><td>De Job</td><td>757</td><td>(Salvati 2020)</td></tr><tr><td>Ladam</td><td>voyage</td><td>1498</td><td>Recreation de la paix faicte à Paris</td><td>858</td><td>(Salvati 2020)</td></tr><tr><td>Ladam</td><td>occasional poem</td><td>1498</td><td>Où est Jubal et Tubal, les chanteurs ?</td><td>278</td><td>(Salvati 2020)</td></tr><tr><td>Ladam</td><td>voyage</td><td>1499</td><td>Rescription à Hesdin, Aire et Bethune</td><td>498</td><td>(Salvati 2020)</td></tr><tr><td>Ladam</td><td>royal entry</td><td>1503</td><td>Le retour de notre seigneur</td><td>551</td><td>(Salvati 2020)</td></tr><tr><td>Ladam</td><td>lament</td><td>1504</td><td>Epitappe dudict feu bastard de Bourgongne</td><td>2251</td><td>(Salvati 2020)</td></tr><tr><td>Ladam</td><td>lament</td><td>1504</td><td>Epitappe de Philibert duc de Savoie</td><td>331</td><td>(Salvati 2020)</td></tr><tr><td>Ladam</td><td>voyage</td><td>1504</td><td>Le voiaige de Philippes prinche des Hespignes</td><td>422</td><td>(Salvati 2020)</td></tr><tr><td>Ladam</td><td>dit</td><td>1505</td><td>Le vergyer d'Austrice</td><td>948</td><td>(Salvati 2020)</td></tr><tr><td>Ladam</td><td>occasional poem</td><td>1506</td><td>Description de la couronne du roy Philippes</td><td>803</td><td>(Salvati 2020)</td></tr><tr><td>Ladam</td><td>lament</td><td>1506</td><td>Deploration sur la mort dudit roy Philippe de Castille</td><td>5122</td><td>(Salvati 2020)</td></tr><tr><td>Ladam</td><td>lament</td><td>1506</td><td>Epitappe de maistre Alexandre Agricola</td><td>250</td><td>(Salvati 2020)</td></tr><tr><td>Ladam</td><td>lament</td><td>474</td><td>Epitappe de Philippes de Bouzenton</td><td>2688</td><td>(Salvati 2020)</td></tr><tr><td>Ladam</td><td>occasional poem</td><td>1506</td><td>Le Confort du Pasteureau d'Austrice</td><td>2688</td><td>(Salvati 2020)</td></tr><tr><td>Ladam</td><td>occasional poem</td><td>1507</td><td>Alliance faicte à Calaix pour Charles d'Austrice</td><td>425</td><td>(Salvati 2020)</td></tr><tr><td>Ladam</td><td>occasional poem</td><td>1508</td><td>L'Attente de paix refformee</td><td>842</td><td>(Salvati 2020)</td></tr><tr><td>Ladam</td><td>occasional poem</td><td>1508</td><td>Sacre legat du siège apostolique</td><td>230</td><td>(Salvati 2020)</td></tr><tr><td>Ladam</td><td>prayer poem</td><td>1508</td><td>Conditor alme siderum</td><td>943</td><td>(Salvati 2020)</td></tr><tr><td>Ladam</td><td>occasional poem</td><td>1508</td><td>L'an mil cinc cens et huic pour vray</td><td>242</td><td>(Salvati 2020)</td></tr><tr><td>Ladam</td><td>dit</td><td>1508</td><td>Constumes seignourales de Bappalmes</td><td>1415</td><td>(Salvati 2020)</td></tr></tbody></table>

<table><tr><td>Ladam</td><td>occasional poem</td><td>1513</td><td>Recoeul de France et d'Angleterre</td><td>1105</td><td>(Salvati 2020)</td></tr><tr><td>Ladam</td><td>royal entry</td><td>1514</td><td>L'entree et couvronnement du roy Franois premier</td><td>655</td><td>(Salvati 2020)</td></tr><tr><td>Ladam</td><td>royal entry</td><td>1514</td><td>L'entree de Charles roy de Castille en Anvers</td><td>966</td><td>(Salvati 2020)</td></tr><tr><td>Ladam</td><td>lament</td><td>1516</td><td>L'Epitappe de Ferdinand d'Aragon</td><td>5333</td><td>(Salvati 2020)</td></tr><tr><td>Ladam</td><td>dit</td><td>1517</td><td>Chasteaulx en Espaigne</td><td>2504</td><td>(Salvati 2020)</td></tr><tr><td>Ladam</td><td>lament</td><td>1518</td><td>Epytappe de Maximilien d'Austrice</td><td>661</td><td>(Salvati 2020)</td></tr><tr><td>Ladam</td><td>voyage</td><td>1535</td><td>Le voyage de La Goulette</td><td>1994</td><td>(Salvati 2020)</td></tr><tr><td>Molinet</td><td>lament</td><td>1467</td><td>Le Trosne d'Honneur</td><td>1538</td><td>(Dupire 1939)</td></tr><tr><td>Molinet</td><td>occasional poem</td><td>1475</td><td>Le Temple de Mars</td><td>1691</td><td></td></tr><tr><td>Molinet</td><td>lament</td><td>1482</td><td>La complainte pour le trepas de Marie de Bourgogne</td><td>3047</td><td>(Becker 1902)</td></tr><tr><td>Molinet</td><td>lament</td><td>1483</td><td>Epitappe de Josse de Lalaiing</td><td>859</td><td>(Thiry 1973)</td></tr><tr><td>Molinet</td><td>lament</td><td>1486</td><td>L'arbre de Bourgogne</td><td>1204</td><td>(Dupire 1939)</td></tr><tr><td>Molinet</td><td>lament</td><td>1489</td><td>Epitappe de Simon Marmyon</td><td>340</td><td>(Dupire 1939)</td></tr><tr><td>Molinet</td><td>lament</td><td>1493</td><td>La mort Federicq empereur</td><td>1290</td><td>(Dupire 1939)</td></tr><tr><td>Molinet</td><td>lament</td><td>a. 1500</td><td>Le miroir de vie</td><td>2013</td><td>(Dupire 1939)</td></tr><tr><td>Molinet</td><td>lament</td><td>1500</td><td>Lamentables regrès pour le trespas d'Albert duc de Zassen</td><td>736</td><td>(Dupire 1939)</td></tr><tr><td>Molinet</td><td>lament</td><td>1502</td><td>Epitappe de monseigneur Henry de Berghes</td><td>428</td><td>(Dupire 1939)</td></tr><tr><td>Molinet</td><td>lament</td><td>1504</td><td>Au comte Englebert de Nassau</td><td>896</td><td>(Dupire 1939)</td></tr><tr><td>Molinet</td><td>lament</td><td>1506</td><td>L'Epitappe du duc Philippe de Bourgogne</td><td>322</td><td>(Dupire 1939)</td></tr><tr><td>O. St-Gelais</td><td>epistle</td><td>1496</td><td>Espitre de Dido à Enée</td><td>2929</td><td></td></tr><tr><td>O. St-Gelais</td><td>lament</td><td>1498</td><td>Epitappe de Charles VIII</td><td>465</td><td></td></tr><tr><td>O. St-Gelais</td><td>lament</td><td>1498</td><td>Complaise de Charles VIII</td><td>3879</td><td></td></tr><tr><td>O. St-Gelais</td><td>Allegoric poem</td><td>1492</td><td>Le Séjour d'honneur</td><td>888</td><td></td></tr><tr><td>O. St-Gelais</td><td>translation/epics</td><td>1498</td><td>Énèide - beg.</td><td>10028</td><td></td></tr></table>

Bibliography

Becker, Philipp August. 1902. "Autobiographisches von Jehan Molinet." *Zeitschrift Für Romanische Philologie* 26 (6): 641–51. https://doi.org/doi:10.1515/zrph.1902.26.6.641.

Camps, Jean-Baptiste, Thibault Clérice, and Ariane Pinche. 2021. "Noisy Medieval Data, from Digitized Manuscript to Stylo-metric Analysis: Evaluating Paul Meyer’s Hagiographic Hypothesis." *Digital Scholarship in the Humanities* 36 (Supplement_2): ii49–ii71. https://doi.org/10.1093/llc/fqab033.

Couhault, Pierre. 2020. *L'Étoffe Des Hérauts. L'office d'armes Dans L'Europe Des Habsbourg à La Renaissance*. Classiques Garnier.

Cretin, Guillaume. 1932. Œuvres Poétiques, éd. Edited by Kathleen Chesney. Paris.

Crétin, Guillaume. 1864. Déploration de Guillaume Crétin Sur Le Trépas de Jean Okeghem: Musicien, Premier Chapelain Du Roi de France et Trésorier de Saint-Martin de Tours, Remise Au Jour. A. Claudin.

Devaux, Jean. 1996. *Jean Molinet, Indiciaire Bourguignon*. Champion.
# Appendix: Composition of the corpus

<table><caption>Table 3: List of the texts of the corpus</caption><thead><tr><th>Author</th><th>Genre</th><th>Date</th><th>Title</th><th>Nb. words</th><th>Source</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>Crétin</td><td>lament</td><td>ca. 1496</td><td>Deploration sur le trespas de feu Okegan</td><td>2847</td><td>(Crétin 1864)</td></tr><tr><td>Crétin</td><td>lament</td><td>3901</td><td>Plainte sur le trespas de messire Guillaume de Byssipat</td><td>3901</td><td>(Cretin 1932)</td></tr><tr><td>Crétin</td><td>lament</td><td>1335</td><td>Plainte sur le trespas de Johan Braconnier</td><td>1335</td><td>(Cretin 1932)</td></tr><tr><td>Crétin</td><td>lament</td><td>7763</td><td>L'apparition du Mareschal sans reproche</td><td>7763</td><td>(Cretin 1932)</td></tr><tr><td>Crétin</td><td>occasional poem</td><td>1498-1501</td><td>La Rescription des femmes de Paris</td><td>153</td><td></td></tr><tr><td>Crétin</td><td>epistle</td><td>1515</td><td>Ad illustrissimum seigneur monseigneur Franciscum valescorum</td><td>680</td><td></td></tr><tr><td>Crétin</td><td>rhymed chronicle</td><td>1515-25</td><td>Chronique françoise</td><td>443</td><td></td></tr><tr><td>Ladam</td><td>lament</td><td>1492</td><td>Le Doeul d'Arras</td><td>509</td><td>(Salvati 2020)</td></tr><tr><td>Ladam</td><td>lament</td><td>1492</td><td>Rescription aux Allemantz</td><td>319</td><td>(Salvati 2020)</td></tr><tr><td>Ladam</td><td>lament</td><td>1494</td><td>L'Epytappe de Philippes de Criefvecoeur</td><td>2073</td><td>(Salvati 2020)</td></tr><tr><td>Ladam</td><td>prayer poem</td><td>1495</td><td>De Job</td><td>757</td><td>(Salvati 2020)</td></tr><tr><td>Ladam</td><td>voyage</td><td>1498</td><td>Recreation de la paix faicte à Paris</td><td>858</td><td>(Salvati 2020)</td></tr><tr><td>Ladam</td><td>occasional poem</td><td>1498</td><td>Où est Jubal et Tubal, les chanteurs ?</td><td>278</td><td>(Salvati 2020)</td></tr><tr><td>Ladam</td><td>voyage</td><td>1499</td><td>Rescription à Hesdin, Aire et Bethune</td><td>498</td><td>(Salvati 2020)</td></tr><tr><td>Ladam</td><td>royal entry</td><td>1503</td><td>Le retour de notre seigneur</td><td>551</td><td>(Salvati 2020)</td></tr><tr><td>Ladam</td><td>lament</td><td>1504</td><td>Epitappe dudict feu bastard de Bourgongne</td><td>2251</td><td>(Salvati 2020)</td></tr><tr><td>Ladam</td><td>lament</td><td>1504</td><td>Epitappe de Philibert duc de Savoie</td><td>331</td><td>(Salvati 2020)</td></tr><tr><td>Ladam</td><td>voyage</td><td>1504</td><td>Le voiaige de Philippes prinche des Hespignes</td><td>422</td><td>(Salvati 2020)</td></tr><tr><td>Ladam</td><td>dit</td><td>1505</td><td>Le vergyer d'Austrice</td><td>948</td><td>(Salvati 2020)</td></tr><tr><td>Ladam</td><td>occasional poem</td><td>1506</td><td>Description de la couronne du roy Philippes</td><td>803</td><td>(Salvati 2020)</td></tr><tr><td>Ladam</td><td>lament</td><td>1506</td><td>Deploration sur la mort dudit roy Philippe de Castille</td><td>5122</td><td>(Salvati 2020)</td></tr><tr><td>Ladam</td><td>lament</td><td>1506</td><td>Epitappe de maistre Alexandre Agricola</td><td>250</td><td>(Salvati 2020)</td></tr><tr><td>Ladam</td><td>lament</td><td>474</td><td>Epitappe de Philippes de Bouzonton</td><td>2688</td><td>(Salvati 2020)</td></tr><tr><td>Ladam</td><td>occasional poem</td><td>1506</td><td>Le Confort du Pasteureau d'Austrice</td><td>2688</td><td>(Salvati 2020)</td></tr><tr><td>Ladam</td><td>occasional poem</td><td>1507</td><td>Alliance faicte à Calaix pour Charles d'Austrice</td><td>425</td><td>(Salvati 2020)</td></tr><tr><td>Ladam</td><td>occasional poem</td><td>1508</td><td>L'Attente de paix refformee</td><td>842</td><td>(Salvati 2020)</td></tr><tr><td>Ladam</td><td>occasional poem</td><td>1508</td><td>Sacre legat du siège apostolique</td><td>230</td><td>(Salvati 2020)</td></tr><tr><td>Ladam</td><td>prayer poem</td><td>1508</td><td>Conditor alme siderum</td><td>943</td><td>(Salvati 2020)</td></tr><tr><td>Ladam</td><td>occasional poem</td><td>1508</td><td>L'an mil cinc cens et huic pour vray</td><td>242</td><td>(Salvati 2020)</td></tr><tr><td>Ladam</td><td>dit</td><td>1508</td><td>Constumes seignourales de Bappalmes</td><td>1415</td><td>(Salvati 2020)</td></tr></tbody></table>

<table><tr><td>Ladam</td><td>occasional poem</td><td>1513</td><td>Recoeur de France et d'Agleterre</td><td>1105</td><td>(Salvati 2020)</td></tr><tr><td>Ladam</td><td>royal entry</td><td>1514</td><td>L'entree et courronnement du roy Franois premier</td><td>655</td><td>(Salvati 2020)</td></tr><tr><td>Ladam</td><td>royal entry</td><td>1514</td><td>L'entree de Charles roy de Castille en Anvers</td><td>966</td><td>(Salvati 2020)</td></tr><tr><td>Ladam</td><td>lament</td><td>1516</td><td>L'Epitappe de Ferdinand d'Aragon</td><td>5333</td><td>(Salvati 2020)</td></tr><tr><td>Ladam</td><td>dit</td><td>1517</td><td>Chasteaulx en Espaigne</td><td>2504</td><td>(Salvati 2020)</td></tr><tr><td>Ladam</td><td>lament</td><td>1518</td><td>Epytappe de Maximilien d'Austrice</td><td>661</td><td>(Salvati 2020)</td></tr><tr><td>Ladam</td><td>voyage</td><td>1535</td><td>Le voyage de La Goulette</td><td>1994</td><td>(Salvati 2020)</td></tr><tr><td>Molinet</td><td>lament</td><td>1467</td><td>Le Trosne d'Honneur</td><td>1538</td><td>(Dupire 1939)</td></tr><tr><td>Molinet</td><td>occasional poem</td><td>1475</td><td>Le Temple de Mars</td><td>1691</td><td></td></tr><tr><td>Molinet</td><td>lament</td><td>1482</td><td>La complainte pour le trespas de Marie de Bourgogne</td><td>3047</td><td>(Becker 1902)</td></tr><tr><td>Molinet</td><td>lament</td><td>1483</td><td>Epitappe de Josse de Lalaiing</td><td>859</td><td>(Thiry 1973)</td></tr><tr><td>Molinet</td><td>lament</td><td>1486</td><td>L'arbre de Bourgogne</td><td>1204</td><td>(Dupire 1939)</td></tr><tr><td>Molinet</td><td>lament</td><td>1489</td><td>Epitappe de Simon Marmyon</td><td>340</td><td>(Dupire 1939)</td></tr><tr><td>Molinet</td><td>lament</td><td>1493</td><td>La mort Federicq empereur</td><td>1290</td><td>(Dupire 1939)</td></tr><tr><td>Molinet</td><td>lament</td><td>a. 1500</td><td>Le miroir de vie</td><td>2013</td><td>(Dupire 1939)</td></tr><tr><td>Molinet</td><td>lament</td><td>1500</td><td>Lamentables regrès pour le trespas d'Albert duc de Zassen</td><td>736</td><td>(Dupire 1939)</td></tr><tr><td>Molinet</td><td>lament</td><td>1502</td><td>Epitappe de monseigneur Henry de Berghes</td><td>428</td><td>(Dupire 1939)</td></tr><tr><td>Molinet</td><td>lament</td><td>1504</td><td>Au comte Englebert de Nassau</td><td>896</td><td>(Dupire 1939)</td></tr><tr><td>Molinet</td><td>lament</td><td>1506</td><td>L'Epitappe du duc Philippe de Bourgogne</td><td>322</td><td>(Dupire 1939)</td></tr><tr><td>O. St-Gelais</td><td>epistle</td><td>1496</td><td>Espitre de Dido à Enée</td><td>2929</td><td></td></tr><tr><td>O. St-Gelais</td><td>lament</td><td>1498</td><td>Epitappe de Charles VIII</td><td>465</td><td></td></tr><tr><td>O. St-Gelais</td><td>lament</td><td>1498</td><td>Complaise de Charles VIII</td><td>3879</td><td></td></tr><tr><td>O. St-Gelais</td><td>Allegoric poem</td><td>1492</td><td>Le Séjour d'honneur</td><td>888</td><td></td></tr><tr><td>O. St-Gelais</td><td>translation/epics</td><td>1498</td><td>Énèide - beg.</td><td>10028</td><td></td></tr></table>

## Bibliography

Becker, Philipp August. 1902. "Autobiographisches von Jehan Molinet." *Zeitschrift Für Romanische Philologie* 26 (6): 641–51. https://doi.org/doi:10.1515/zrph.1902.26.6.641.

Camps, Jean-Baptiste, Thibault Clérice, and Ariane Pinche. 2021. "Noisy Medieval Data, from Digitized Manuscript to Stylo-metric Analysis: Evaluating Paul Meyer's Hagiographic Hypothesis." *Digital Scholarship in the Humanities* 36 (Supplement_2): ii49–ii71. https://doi.org/10.1093/llc/fqab033.

Couhault, Pierre. 2020. *L'Étoffe Des Hérauts. L'office d'armes Dans L'Europe Des Habsbourg à La Renaissance*. Classiques Garnier.

Cretin, Guillaume. 1932. Œuvres Poétiques, éd. Edited by Kathleen Chesney. Paris.

Crétin, Guillaume. 1864. Déploration de Guillaume Crétin Sur Le Trépas de Jean Okeghem: Musicien, Premier Chapelain Du Roi de France et Trésorier de Saint-Martin de Tours, Remise Au Jour. A. Claudin.

Devaux, Jean. 1996. *Jean Molinet, Indiciaire Bourguignon*. Champion.
Dupire, Noël. 1939. *Les Faictz et Dictz de Jean Molinet*. Société des anciens textes français.

Eder, Maciej, Jan Rybicki, and Mike Kestemont. 2016. "Stylometry with R: A Package for Computational Text Analysis." *R Journal* 8 (1): 107–21. https://journal.r-project.org/archive/2016/RJ-2016-007/index.html.

Frieden, Philippe. 2013. *La Lettre et Le Miroir: écrire l'histoire d'actualité Selon Jean Molinet*. Honoré Champion.

Kestemont, Mike, Justin Stover, Moshe Koppel, Folgert Karsdorp, and Walter Daelemans. 2016. "Authenticating the Writings of Julius Caesar." *Expert Systems with Applications* 63: 86–96.

Koppel, Moshe, and Yaron Winter. 2014. "Determining If Two Documents Are Written by the Same Author." *Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology* 65 (1): 178–87.

Ladam, Nicaise. 1975. *Mémoire et épitaphe de Ferdinand d'Aragon: édition Critique Par Claude Thiry*. Les Belles Lettres.

Lemaire, Jacques Charles, and André Tourneux. 2001. *Le Mémoire de L'aigle et de La Salamandre de Nicaise Ladam, Roi d'armes de Charles Quint*. Peeters.

Lemaître, Guillaume, Fernando Nogueira, and Christos K Aridas. 2017. "Imbalanced-Learn: A Python Toolbox to Tackle the Curse of Imbalanced Datasets in Machine Learning." *The Journal of Machine Learning Research* 18 (1): 559–63.

Plecháč, Petr, Klemens Bobenhausen, and Benjamin Hammerich. 2018. "Versification and Authorship Attribution. A Pilot Study on Czech, German, Spanish, and English Poetry." *Studia Metrica et Poetica* 5 (2): 29–54.

Salvati, Benedetta. 2020. "Édition Critique Numérique de La Chronique Abrégée: Œuvres et Recueil (1488-1546) de Nicaise Ladam." Thèse en préparation, Université Paris Sciences & Lettres.

Sapkota, Upendra, Steven Bethard, Manuel Montes, and Thamar Solorio. 2015. "Not All Character N-Grams Are Created Equal: A Study in Authorship Attribution." In *Proceedings of the 2015 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies*, 93–102.

Thiry, Claude. 1973. "Un inédit de Jean Molinet: l'épitaphe de Josse de Lalaing, sire de Montigny (1483)." *Bulletin de La Commission Royale d'Histoire* 139 (1): 29–66.

# On the Relation of Sound and Suspense in Literary Fiction

## Guhr, Svenja Simone

svenja.guhr@tu-darmstadt.de
Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany

## Algee-Hewitt, Mark Andrew

malgeehe@stanford.edu
Stanford University, U.S.

## Introduction

Since the 1960s, Sound Studies has offered literary studies an innovative approach to the analysis of sounds and loudness (see i.a. Schaeffer 2017; Picker 2003; Snaith 2020). Originally sound is defined as physical vibrations transmitted through a medium such as the air from a source to, for example, the ear of a listener, who is ready to process the vibrations into information. In printed or digitized literary texts described sound cannot be processed in this way. Instead, sound is represented at the word level in the novel and only understood through an interpretation of the representation of the phenomenon, focusing on sound descriptions or onomatopoeia (Schafer 1994: 126; Rice 2015).

Early Sound Studies scholars, such as Schafer (1994), described changing soundscapes (composite of “sound” and “landscape”) over time, i.a., referring to literary texts (claiming that “writers of fiction were reliable ‘earwitnesses’ whose writings ‘constitute the best guide available in the reconstruction of soundscapes past’” (Schafer 1994: 9 in Snaith 2020: 20). Building on these approaches, e.g., Picker (2003) analyzes sounds in literature referring to Dickens’ soundscape descriptions of his Victorian London. Most recent studies can be found in the essay collection *Literature and Sound* edited by Snaith (2020) that deals with the examination of represented sound and hearing in literary texts.

This paper applies a sound studies approach to a literary studies use case: we analyze whether there is a correlation between the diegetic description of ambient sounds and suspenseful text passages in a 19th century English novel corpus. Our approach is based on suspense theories in literary fiction drawing on previous narratological studies with particular attention to Brewer (1988) and Carroll (1996). According to them, “[a]dditional information is built into the discourse structure [of literary texts] [...] to stretch the story and increase suspense” by postponing the resolution of a conflict (Sánchez Penzo 2010: 31).

Our hypothesis is that suspenseful passages contain more detailed descriptions of the story’s ambient soundscape than unsuspenseful passages (e.g., the growl of a wild animal, the creaking of a wooden floor in a silent room). Such detailed descriptions of ambient sound stretch out the story and postpone the resolution of the conflict, which increases the level of suspense in the literary texts.

## Analysis

In a mixed-methods approach, we analyzed the relationship between sound description and suspense in four steps:

1. First, we compiled a text corpus of 55 19th century English fictional prose texts based on a selection of English novels and short stories rated as particularly suspenseful, which have already been annotated for suspense in an earlier project (Algee-Hewitt et al. 2015).

2. We then manually annotated 21 novels and short stories (~1.3 Mio tokens, inter-annotator-agreement 0.80 Cohen's kappa (Developers 2022)) following iteratively created annotation guidelines (cf. Reiter 2020) for the binary annotation (sound vs. no sound) of explicitly described ambient sounds in literary texts. The annotated corpus, as well as the annotation guidelines, and Jupyter notebooks used for the analysis are accessible via a GitHub repository (Guhr 2023).

3. 17 of the annotated novels served as training data for a classifier with a transfer learning approach (Kamath et al. 2019). The NEISS TEI Entity Enricher of the open-source NTEE software (cf. Flüh/Lemke 2022) was then trained for the automatic annotation
Dupire, Noël. 1939. *Les Faictz et Dictz de Jean Molinet*. Société des anciens textes français.

Eder, Maciej, Jan Rybicki, and Mike Kestemont. 2016. "Stylometry with R: A Package for Computational Text Analysis." *R Journal* 8 (1): 107–21. https://journal.r-project.org/archive/2016/RJ-2016-007/index.html.

Frieden, Philippe. 2013. *La Lettre et Le Miroir: écrire l'histoire d'actualité Selon Jean Molinet*. Honoré Champion.

Kestemont, Mike, Justin Stover, Moshe Koppel, Folgert Karsdorp, and Walter Daelemans. 2016. "Authenticating the Writings of Julius Caesar." *Expert Systems with Applications* 63: 86–96.

Koppel, Moshe, and Yaron Winter. 2014. "Determining If Two Documents Are Written by the Same Author." *Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology* 65 (1): 178–87.

Ladam, Nicaise. 1975. *Mémoire et épitaphe de Ferdinand d'Aragon: édition Critique Par Claude Thiry*. Les Belles Lettres.

Lemaire, Jacques Charles, and André Tourneux. 2001. *Le Mémoire de L'aigle et de La Salamandre de Nicaise Ladam, Roi d'armes de Charles Quint*. Peeters.

Lemaître, Guillaume, Fernando Nogueira, and Christos K Aridas. 2017. "Imbalanced-Learn: A Python Toolbox to Tackle the Curse of Imbalanced Datasets in Machine Learning." *The Journal of Machine Learning Research* 18 (1): 559–63.

Plecháč, Petr, Klemens Bobenhausen, and Benjamin Hammerich. 2018. "Versification and Authorship Attribution. A Pilot Study on Czech, German, Spanish, and English Poetry." *Studia Metrica et Poetica* 5 (2): 29–54.

Salvati, Benedetta. 2020. "Édition Critique Numérique de La Chronique Abrégée: Œuvres et Recueil (1488-1546) de Nicaise Ladam." Thèse en préparation, Université Paris Sciences & Lettres.

Sapkota, Upendra, Steven Bethard, Manuel Montes, and Thamar Solorio. 2015. "Not All Character N-Grams Are Created Equal: A Study in Authorship Attribution." In *Proceedings of the 2015 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies*, 93–102.

Thiry, Claude. 1973. "Un inédit de Jean Molinet: l'épitaphe de Josse de Lalaing, sire de Montigny (1483)." *Bulletin de La Commission Royale d'Histoire* 139 (1): 29–66.

# On the Relation of Sound and Suspense in Literary Fiction

## Guhr, Svenja Simone

svenja.guhr@tu-darmstadt.de
Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany

## Algee-Hewitt, Mark Andrew

malgeehe@stanford.edu
Stanford University, U.S.

## Introduction

Since the 1960s, Sound Studies has offered literary studies an innovative approach to the analysis of sounds and loudness (see i.a. Schaeffer 2017; Picker 2003; Snaith 2020). Originally sound is defined as physical vibrations transmitted through a medium such as the air from a source to, for example, the ear of a listener, who is ready to process the vibrations into information. In printed or digitized literary texts described sound cannot be processed in this way. Instead, sound is represented at the word level in the novel and only understood through an interpretation of the representation of the phenomenon, focusing on sound descriptions or onomatopoeia (Schafer 1994: 126; Rice 2015).

Early Sound Studies scholars, such as Schafer (1994), described changing soundscapes (composite of “sound” and “landscape”) over time, i.a., referring to literary texts (claiming that “writers of fiction were reliable ‘earwitnesses’ whose writings ‘constitute the best guide available in the reconstruction of soundscapes past’” (Schafer 1994: 9 in Snaith 2020: 20). Building on these approaches, e.g., Picker (2003) analyzes sounds in literature referring to Dickens’ soundscape descriptions of his Victorian London. Most recent studies can be found in the essay collection *Literature and Sound* edited by Snaith (2020) that deals with the examination of represented sound and hearing in literary texts.

This paper applies a sound studies approach to a literary studies use case: we analyze whether there is a correlation between the diegetic description of ambient sounds and suspenseful text passages in a 19th century English novel corpus. Our approach is based on suspense theories in literary fiction drawing on previous narratological studies with particular attention to Brewer (1988) and Carroll (1996). According to them, “[a]dditional information is built into the discourse structure [of literary texts] [...] to stretch the story and increase suspense” by postponing the resolution of a conflict (Sánchez Penzo 2010: 31).

Our hypothesis is that suspenseful passages contain more detailed descriptions of the story’s ambient soundscape than unsuspenseful passages (e.g., the growl of a wild animal, the creaking of a wooden floor in a silent room). Such detailed descriptions of ambient sound stretch out the story and postpone the resolution of the conflict, which increases the level of suspense in the literary texts.

## Analysis

In a mixed-methods approach, we analyzed the relationship between sound description and suspense in four steps:

1. First, we compiled a text corpus of 55 19th century English fictional prose texts based on a selection of English novels and short stories rated as particularly suspenseful, which have already been annotated for suspense in an earlier project (Algee-Hewitt et al. 2015).

2. We then manually annotated 21 novels and short stories (~1.3 Mio tokens, inter-annotator-agreement 0.80 Cohen's kappa (Developers 2022)) following iteratively created annotation guidelines (cf. Reiter 2020) for the binary annotation (sound vs. no sound) of explicitly described ambient sounds in literary texts. The annotated corpus, as well as the annotation guidelines, and Jupyter notebooks used for the analysis are accessible via a GitHub repository (Guhr 2023).

3. 17 of the annotated novels served as training data for a classifier with a transfer learning approach (Kamath et al. 2019). The NEISS TEI Entity Enricher of the open-source NTEE software (cf. Flüh/Lemke 2022) was then trained for the automatic annotation