Acknowledgements
A number of porcupines huddled together for warmth on a cold day in winter; but, as they began to prick one another with their quills, they were obliged to disperse. However, the cold drove them together again, when just the same thing happened. At last, after many turns of huddling and dispersing, they discovered that they would be best off by remaining at a little distance from one another. In the same way, the need of society drives the human porcupines together, only to be mutually repelled by the many prickly and disagreeable qualities of their nature.Footnote 1
In writing this book, we somehow managed to avoid the porcupine's dilemma and collaborate entirely without insult or injury. We have also profited enormously from the warmth of many colleagues whom we wish to thank for their generous and invaluable feedback. Of course, any and all errors that remain are ours and ours alone, though we thank you, gentle reader-function, to forgive them. Remember: fellow porcupines don't read the footnotes.
Our principal debt is to John Burrows, the dedicatee of this book, for inaugurating computational stylistics as an area of scholarly inquiry and developing new data-driven methods for the study of literary style. This book is but one small product of his impressive critical legacy, and we hope we have done justice to his scholarship in the pages that follow.
We thank our wonderful colleagues for providing unwavering support while this book was in preparation, and for the challenging questions and apposite suggestions for improvement offered in response to earlier versions of the chapters presented at conferences and meetings. Chief among these are the scholars who participated in our Beyond Authorship symposium in Newcastle, Australia, 24–7 June 2014, whose contributions helped us to formulate our ideas about applying computational stylistics in more descriptive areas: John Burrows, Douglas Bruster, Louisa Connors, Douglas Duhaime, Gabriel Egan, Jack Elliott, Heather Froehlich, Peter Groves, Jonathan Hope, MacDonald P. Jackson, Lynn Magnusson, Glenn Roe, Ros Smith, and Erica Zimmer.
We owe a debt of gratitude to Bill Pascoe for overseeing development of the Intelligent Archive software so crucial to this project. Likewise, we are especially beholden to our senior research assistant, Alexis Antonia, and to Jack Elliott, who served as a consultant analyst, developer, and sounding-board. Without their considerable contributions, this book would not have been possible.
For sage advice, timely provocation, and much-needed encouragement, we thank Michael Best, Lukas Erne, Oliver Gondring, Fen Greatley-Hirsch, Margaret Harris, Matthew Harrison, Yasmin Haskell, Tim Haydon, Peter Holbrook, Mark Houlahan, Fotis Jannidis, Laurie Johnson, Pete Kirwan, Ian Lancashire, Eleanor Lowe, Ruth Lunney, Kathleen Lynch, Willard McCarty, David McInnis, Jenna Mead, Philip Mead, Matt Munson, Sarah Neville, Catherine Oddie, Helen Ostovich, Trisha Pender, Steffen Pielström, Malte Rehbein, Tom Rutter, Christof Schöch, Tomoji Tabata, Gary Taylor, Justin Tonra, Lyn Tribble, Margaret Tudeau-Clayton, Bob White, Martin Wiggins, Pip Willcox, Owen Williams, Michael Witmore, the late Anne Wortham, and Chris Wortham.
We have also benefitted greatly from substantial institutional support. We are deeply grateful to the Australian Research Council for the award of a Discovery Project (DP120101955) grant, which funded necessary text preparation and software development, as well as the Beyond Authorship symposium. While working on this book, both authors also enjoyed invaluable research time through the award of research fellowships and visiting appointments. We wish to thank the University of Würzburg, which hosted Craig for sabbatical leave in 2013, and the Leverhulme Trust for a visiting research fellowship that allowed Greatley-Hirsch to work at the Centre for Textual Studies, De Montfort University, that same year. We are also grateful to the Moore Institute for Research in the Humanities and Social Studies at NUI Galway, the Institute for Advanced Studies at the University of Western Australia, and the Folger Institute of the Folger Shakespeare Library for the award of short-term fellowships in 2014 and 2015.
To our families, especially our better halves, we are eternally thankful for your unflinching love and support.
1 Arthur Schopenhauer, ‘A Few Parables’, Studies in Pessimism: A Series of Essays, trans. T. Bailey Saunders (London: Swann Sonnenschein & Co., 1893), 142.
