Maciej Eder
An academic researcher

I am the Director of the Institute of Polish Language at the Polish Academy of Sciences, and an Associate Professor at the Pedagogical University of Kraków, Poland (the latter part-time).
Although my background is early modern literature (Polish and Latin), my main field seems to be computer-assisted text analysis or, to be precise, a cross-section of literature, quantitative linguistics, and computational methodology, with special attention paid to machine-learning techniques. Seemingly, the best description of such a combination of research interests can be referred to as Digital Humanities. What I find particularly interesting in this field, is that it re-opens some old research questions and tries to answer them using exact methodology, taking advantage of ever-growing computer power and analyzing amounts of data that our predecessors couldn’t even dream of. Next, I like Digital Humanities’ emphasis on team work and actual collaboration between scholars from different disciplines. Last but not least, I find Digital Humanities attractive because of its inclusiveness, or at least, awareness to implicit and explicit imbalances that affect academia; I do believe that the DH community has a potential to spread the ideas of inclusiveness to other academic fields.
My recent research is focused on computational stylistics, or stylometry. Specifically, I’m interested in the question of authorship: To which extent written texts preserve unique stylistic traces of people who penned them? How such an authorial “signal” can be effectively extracted from texts that were altered by editors, or imperfectly copied by several scribes? How large a text sample needs to be to reliably betray its author? Can stylometric methods be generalized to support literary criticism in the “distant reading” paradigm? These and similar questions are undertaken in my stylometric studies.
As a literary scholar, I am interested in Polish literature of the 16th and the 17th centuries: critical scholarly editions being my main area of expertise. My major accomplishments in this field include a critical edition of 16th-century Polish translations of the Dialogue of Salomon and Marcolf, the treatise De libertate politica by Andrzej Wolan from 1572 (edited with prof. Roman Mazurkiewicz), as well as The Epigrams (Fraszki) by Jan Kochanowski – this collaborative work-in-progress should be out rather soon.
There is way too little time to get involved in several activities simultaneously. Therefore, I have to share my attention between a few major involvements: running the Institute of the Polish Language (Polish Academy of Sciences), chairing the Committee of Linguistics at the Polish Academy of Sciences, vice-chairing the COST Action “Distant Reading”, contributing to the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations as its co-secretary (in the years 2017–2019), supporting the Computational Stylistics Group, etc. In rare moments of spare time, I develop the package Stylo, which is a made-to-measure computer program for performing stylometric analyses. I think in Polish, code in R, tweet in English, and live in Kraków, Poland.
news
Dec 6, 2020 | The version 0.7.4 of the R package “stylo” released! Click here for further details. |
Nov 15, 2020 | Wow! It turns out our Horizon 2020 grant proposal entitled Computational Literary Studies Infrastructure (CLS INFRA) has been funded!!! Have a look here for a concise summary of the project; a dedicated website is pending. |
Jun 15, 2020 | Under the pandemics measures, plenary talks sometimes need to be pre-recorded and then presented remotely. Here’s my talk delivered at a general meeting of the Committee for Linguistics of the Polish Academy of Sciences, entitled Geometria, semantyka i językowy obraz świata. |
May 5, 2020 | Next episodes of the YouTube series on the package “stylo”: a follow-up on installation and on basic parameters of the package. |
Apr 27, 2020 | Looking for ideas during lockdown and/or quarantine? Check out our planned series of YouTube videos on the package “stylo”: starting with a general introduction. |
Feb 20, 2020 | Want to know more about Sbalchiero-Eder rule? Check out the following paper Topic modeling, long samples and the best number of topics. |
Jan 10, 2020 | Proudly announcing our paper on Harper Lee, Truman Capote and Other People. Check out this blog post and a general overview of the project. |
Dec 20, 2019 | A paper on typology of texts, written with Rafał Górski, has just been published (in Polish). Downloadabne PDF here. |
Oct 15, 2019 | Hear! Hear! Our new book on quantitative linguistic methods applied to language changes is out, finally! Check here for more details, or download the book in PDF directly from here. |
Jul 22, 2019 | About to start teaching the two-week course Stylometry at the European Summer University “Culture and Technology” (ESU) in Leipzig, Germany, with Jeremi Ochab. |