Linguistic Profiling of Text Genres: An Exploration of Fictional vs. Non-Fictional Texts

Linguistic Profiling of Texts Across Textual Genres and Readability Levels. An Exploratory Study on Italian Fictional Prose

In this paper we present a case study focusing on the literature genre, in particular on Italian fictional prose, aimed at identifying the features characterizing this text type. Identified features were tested in two classification tasks, i.e. by genre and by readability, with promising results. Interestingly, the same multi–level set of linguistic features turned out to reliably capture varia...

Fictional and Non Fictional Television Celebrates Earth Day: Or, Politics Is Comedy Plus Pretense

While there is much new work in the field of communications that challenges such distinctions, many scholars who study the medium still assume a clear and natural separation between fictional and non-fictional television. Falling into the former category are most prime-time shows, specials, movies and other broadcasts serving, it is assumed, primarily as entertainment. Further, many scholars as...

Fictional Women in Mathematics

This article will argue that the situation for female mathematicians in fiction has improved, but that there is still cause for concern. You may wonder why you should care about this at all since these fictional women are (by definition) not real and therefore unlikely to be dues paying members of the AWM! With this in mind, in addition to providing examples of female mathematicians in literatu...

Mirroring Fictional Others

Fictional Planet Ballardia

The Rock Cycle is a useful pedagogical device. Science-fiction novelist James G. Ballard published a colorful description of a nameless fictional world in 1957 that has an artificially closed Rock Cycle. Were such an anthropogenic cycle instigated for Earth, it would be consistent with James Hutton’s viewpoint on the Earth as a self-repairing machine without an endogenetic end to planetary Geol...