Re-evaluating the Tomes for the Times

TY - CHAP

T1 - Re-evaluating the Tomes for the Times

AU - Brate, Ryan

AU - van Erp, Marieke

AU - van den Bosch, Antal

N1 - Publisher Copyright: © 2024 ELRA Language Resource Association: CC BY-NC 4.0.

PY - 2024

Y1 - 2024

N2 - Literature is to some degree a snapshot of the time it was written in and the societal attitudes of the time. Not all depictions are pleasant or in-line with modern-day sensibilities; this becomes problematic when the prevalent depictions over a large body of work are negatively biased, leading to their normalisation. Many much-loved and much-read classics are set in periods of heightened social inequality: slavery, pre-womens' rights movements, colonialism, etc. In this paper, we exploit known text co-occurrence metrics with respect to token-level level contexts to identify prevailing themes associated with known problematic descriptors. We see that prevalent, negative depictions are perpetuated by classic literature. We propose that such a methodology could form the basis of a system for making explicit such problematic associations, for interested parties: such as, sensitivity coordinators of publishing houses, library curators, or organisations concerned with social justice.

AB - Literature is to some degree a snapshot of the time it was written in and the societal attitudes of the time. Not all depictions are pleasant or in-line with modern-day sensibilities; this becomes problematic when the prevalent depictions over a large body of work are negatively biased, leading to their normalisation. Many much-loved and much-read classics are set in periods of heightened social inequality: slavery, pre-womens' rights movements, colonialism, etc. In this paper, we exploit known text co-occurrence metrics with respect to token-level level contexts to identify prevailing themes associated with known problematic descriptors. We see that prevalent, negative depictions are perpetuated by classic literature. We propose that such a methodology could form the basis of a system for making explicit such problematic associations, for interested parties: such as, sensitivity coordinators of publishing houses, library curators, or organisations concerned with social justice.

KW - bias in literature

KW - charged terms

KW - corpus linguistics

UR - https://www.scopus.com/pages/publications/85195924815

M3 - Contribution to conference proceedings

AN - SCOPUS:85195924815

SN - 978-249381410-4

SP - 13734

EP - 13739

BT - 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING)

PB - European Language Resources Association (ELRA)

ER -