{"id":203,"date":"2024-03-04T10:15:44","date_gmt":"2024-03-04T10:15:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.uantwerpen.be\/stephenking\/?p=203"},"modified":"2024-03-04T10:16:44","modified_gmt":"2024-03-04T10:16:44","slug":"new-publication-an-article-about-richard-bachman","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.uantwerpen.be\/stephenking\/2024\/03\/04\/new-publication-an-article-about-richard-bachman\/","title":{"rendered":"New Publication: an Article about Richard Bachman"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>Together with <strong>Dorothy Henriette Modrall Sperling<\/strong> and <strong>Mike Kestemont<\/strong>, I (Vincent) have written an article that was recently published in the <em><a href=\"https:\/\/jcls.io\/\">Journal of Computational Literary Studies<\/a><\/em>. The article is titled \u2018<a href=\"https:\/\/jcls.io\/article\/id\/3594\/\">The Authorship of Stephen King\u2019s Books Written Under the Pseudonym \u201cRichard Bachman\u201d: A Stylometric Analysis<\/a>\u2019. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>When we started work on this over a year ago, our research question was simply: <em>would current methods in computer stylometry be able to identify King\u2019s style in his novels published as Bachman<\/em>? This proved to be the case. Additionally, we asked ourselves which aspects of King\u2019s style were so present in the early Bachman books that may have caused many readers at the time to have strong suspicions that Bachman was King. We arrived at his use of brand names and references to popular culture as a clearly identifiable characteristic of his texts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<!--more-->\n\n\n\n<p>Here is the abstract of our article:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Between 1977 and 1984, Stephen King published five novels under the pseudonym \u201cRichard Bachman\u201d. Reviewers noted similarities between King\u2019s and Bachman\u2019s writing styles when <\/em>Thinner<em> (1984) was published, ultimately leading to King\u2019s unmasking. We investigate whether computational authorship analysis techniques can correctly identify King as the author of the Bachman books out of a selection of contemporary candidate authors \u2013 Dean Koontz, Peter Straub, and Thomas Harris. We also perform a post-hoc analysis of the use of pop-culture references and brand names in Bachman, King, Koontz, Straub, and Harris novels, based on comments in reviews of Bachman and King novels. The references extracted from the Bachman books occurred significantly more often in King\u2019s texts than in the others\u2019, showing that attentive readers could have \u201cheard King\u2019s voice\u201d in the Bachman books through what a reviewer denigratingly called King\u2019s \u201ccompulsion to list brand-name products and his affinity for pop-cult teenage junk\u201d.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/jcls.io\/article\/id\/3594\/\">Read the full article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Together with Dorothy Henriette Modrall Sperling and Mike Kestemont, I (Vincent) have written an article that was recently published in the Journal of Computational Literary Studies. The article is titled \u2018The Authorship of Stephen King\u2019s Books Written Under the Pseudonym \u201cRichard Bachman\u201d: A Stylometric Analysis\u2019. When we started work on this over a year ago, &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/blog.uantwerpen.be\/stephenking\/2024\/03\/04\/new-publication-an-article-about-richard-bachman\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">New Publication: an Article about Richard Bachman<\/span> <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-203","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uantwerpen.be\/stephenking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/203","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uantwerpen.be\/stephenking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uantwerpen.be\/stephenking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uantwerpen.be\/stephenking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uantwerpen.be\/stephenking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=203"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uantwerpen.be\/stephenking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/203\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":207,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uantwerpen.be\/stephenking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/203\/revisions\/207"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uantwerpen.be\/stephenking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=203"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uantwerpen.be\/stephenking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=203"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uantwerpen.be\/stephenking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=203"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}