Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
Date of Degree
6-2024
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
M.A.
Program
Digital Humanities
Advisor
Matthew Gold
Subject Categories
Digital Humanities | English Language and Literature
Keywords
stylometry, transgender linguistics, sociolinguistics
Abstract
Project MapLemon is a corpus for stylometric demographic identification of 54,000+ words across 345 participants, originally created to obtain a baseline corpus for linguistic variation among North American English speakers. The corpus contains responses from 30 linguistic backgrounds, and 40 US states and 6+ Canadian provinces. Project MapLemon has innovated a new method for data collection for linguistic variants in the natural, digital written word. Project MapLemon utilizes a hand-drawn map and asks the participant to give directions via this map, as well as asking participants for a recipe for lemonade. In addition to its novel collection methods, MapLemon contains responses from 212 transgender and non-binary people; analysis of which has shown that transgender people write most similarly (based on parts of speech) to their sex assigned at birth, then to their gender, and are dissimilar in their writing to other opposite-sex transgender people. Furthermore, the analysis suggests that non-binary people are their own gender category and cannot be classed with any other gender.
Recommended Citation
Manning, Theodore D., "Project MapLemon: Peeling Back the Secrets of Queer Writing Through Stylometric Demographic Identification" (2024). CUNY Academic Works.
https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/5795