Experimental texts pose something of a quandary to electronic textual analysis in that they tend to abandon those typical statistical trends required to form an authorial signature. Computational stylistics, for all its analytic diversity, is utterly dependent on the integrity of its authorial signature if it is to be used as an approach to analysis. If you want to see why computational stylistics is the realm of digital humanists and not purebred statisticians or computer scientists, run Finnegans Wake through R. Of course, the nature of experimental texts, while problematic in relation to any analysis based on computational linguistics, also presents the opportunity for textual explorations of a refreshingly unpredictable fashion – it is in experimental works that the digital humanist can hope to produce results that are truly unexpected, even if the unexpected is precisely that which is expected. Enter Dave Lordan, and the wonderfully crafted First Book of Frags, his recent collection of experimental short stories. At first I had intended to offer a traditional review of the text, but these will undoubtedly be in plentiful supply, and with time against me and my curiosity piqued at the prospect of running a brand new experimental text through the digital gauntlet, I couldn’t resist but take a computational approach. This decision was of course influenced by the fact that this is a collection of experimental short stories – 16 unique segments – mouth-watering to a cluster fiend such as myself.
Amongst his many other accomplishments, Ian Fellows will long be remembered as the scholar who gave us empirical word clouds. Using his innovative R package, I generated such a visualization of the top 50 most frequently used words in Lordan’s collection, excluding those that would be considered common. Common words only have significance in the development of an authorial signature, and thus would have served little purpose to this particular aspect of the analysis.
50 most frequent uncommon words in Dave Lordan’s First Book of Frags
Kneeling on the Redwood Floor by James O'Sullivan is available from Lapwing Publications. 
