“Drawing Elena Ferrante’s Profile [Workshop Proceedings, Padova, 7 September 2017]”, 2017-09-07 (; similar):
The chapters of this volume report the results of this endeavour that were first presented during the international workshop Drawing Elena Ferrante’s Profile in Padua on 7 September 2017 as part of the 3rd IQLA-GIAT Summer School in Quantitative Analysis of Textual Data. The fascinating research findings suggest that Elena Ferrante’s work definitely deserves “many hands” as well as an extensive effort to understand her distinct writing style and the reasons for her worldwide success.
…In 2016, an Italian research team embarked on a study suitable for submitting to the international scientific community for debate. It collected a corpus of 150 novels published in the last 30 years, written by 40 different Italian authors, and chosen according to precise parameters that took into account the main hypotheses emerging over the years concerning the real identity of Elena Ferrante, and the general scenario of contemporary Italian literature. To submit their findings to a broader scientific community for discussion, the authors adopted the well-established practice of presenting the results at specialist conferences and as peer-reviewed journal articles. They also went a step further: in the conviction that any worthwhile research is—by its very nature—transparent and available for debating, continuing, and confuting, as the case may be, they circulated their data to international experts of authorship attribution, profiling and analysis of textual data, inviting them to apply their own analytical methods to the material made available.
This volume is a collection of the contributions of various researchers who used various scientific methods to identify the author behind the novels by Elena Ferrante—a nom de plume that has become one of the most remarkable and often-discussed successes in the publishing world in recent years. The list of the academics involved, in addition to the curators of this volume, Arjuna Tuzzi and Michele Cortelazzo (University of Padova), includes (in alphabetical order): Maciej Eder (Pedagogical University of Kraków—Polish Academy of Sciences, Poland), Patrick Juola (Duquesne University of Pittsburgh, PA USA), Vittorio Loreto and his research team, Margherita Lalli and Francesca Tria (University of Roma “La Sapienza”, Italy), George Mikros (National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece), Pierre Ratinaud (University of Toulouse II “Jean Jaurès” France), Jan Rybicki (Jagiellonian University of Kraków, Poland), and Jacques Savoy (University of Neuchâtel, Switzerland). The results of the research conducted by this international group of experts were presented for the first time during the workshop Drawing Elena Ferrante’s profile, held in Padua on 7 September 2017, as part of the 3rd IQLA-GIAT Summer School in Quantitative Analysis of Textual Data. The Summer School, directed by Arjuna Tuzzi and run by Padova University’s Dipartimento di Filosofia, Sociologia, Pedagogia e Psicologia Applicata [Department of Philosophy, Sociology, Education and Applied Psychology], is an interdisciplinary program financed by the University of Padova. The exchange of ideas among the experts at the workshop, with the addition of contributions from 20 participants (from 11 different countries) attending the Summer School, provided the basis for the present publication.
Reading this volume, it is very interesting to see how the various contributions succeed in producing a genuinely interdisciplinary study on a concrete object of study. Not only were the authors of the contributions from all sorts of disciplines (linguists, social scientists, computer scientists, mathematicians, statisticians, physicists), they also conversed with one another from different analytical approaches. In addition, the vast majority of them do not speak Italian, so they worked on the corpus of novels completely blinded to the meaning of the words, trusting entirely to their methods for quantitatively analyzing textual data. Though they moved from different perspectives, their results supported and strengthened each other’s like the different voices in a choir, leading to remarkably coherent and integrated conclusion.