• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.59 no.4
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• pp.511-526
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• 2013

Focusing on Anna Katharine Green's Amelia Butterworth series and Agatha Christie's Miss Marple mysteries, this paper aims to examine the contradictory representation of a detective in spinster detective fiction. The spinster detective fiction reveals distinct ways of representing a female detective from the earlier woman detective fiction. Unlike the earlier woman detective represented as submissive and desperate for survival, a spinster detective is a wealthy, intelligent, brave, and independent woman from an upper class family. Since a spinster detective's attributes honor such masculine qualities as independence, intelligence, courage, and capacity for leadership, the spinster detective fiction has a possibility to threaten the established patriarchal authority. The possibility of gender disruption in the spinster detective fiction is, however, contained by the spinster's marginal position in the patriarchal system. Since a spinster exists outside the normal expectation of a woman's life in patriarchal society, a spinster detective creates no conflict with the dominant gender ideology. Furthermore, a spinster detective is represented as a conservative elderly woman expressing reactionary views on social, political issues including women's problems. The spinster detective fiction reinforces the established gender norms rather than challenges and questions them.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.25 no.3
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• pp.89-115
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• 2019

This study was conducted to present the stylistic differences between Arthur Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie, famous as writers of classical mystery novels, through data analysis, and further to present the analytical methodology of the study of style based on text mining. The reason why we chose mystery novels for our research is because the unique devices that exist in classical mystery novels have strong stylistic characteristics, and furthermore, by choosing Arthur Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie, who are also famous to the general reader, as subjects of analysis, so that people who are unfamiliar with the research can be familiar with them. The primary objective of this study is to identify how the differences exist within the text and to interpret the effects of these differences on the reader. Accordingly, in addition to events and characters, which are key elements of mystery novels, the writer's grammatical style of writing was defined in style and attempted to analyze it. Two series and four books were selected by each writer, and the text was divided into sentences to secure data. After measuring and granting the emotional score according to each sentence, the emotions of the page progress were visualized as a graph, and the trend of the event progress in the novel was identified under eight themes by applying Topic modeling according to the page. By organizing co-occurrence matrices and performing network analysis, we were able to visually see changes in relationships between people as events progressed. In addition, the entire sentence was divided into a grammatical system based on a total of six types of writing style to identify differences between writers and between works. This enabled us to identify not only the general grammatical writing style of the author, but also the inherent stylistic characteristics in their unconsciousness, and to interpret the effects of these characteristics on the reader. This series of research processes can help to understand the context of the entire text based on a defined understanding of the style, and furthermore, by integrating previously individually conducted stylistic studies. This prior understanding can also contribute to discovering and clarifying the existence of text in unstructured data, including online text. This could help enable more accurate recognition of emotions and delivery of commands on an interactive artificial intelligence platform that currently converts voice into natural language. In the face of increasing attempts to analyze online texts, including New Media, in many ways and discover social phenomena and managerial values, it is expected to contribute to more meaningful online text analysis and semantic interpretation through the links to these studies. However, the fact that the analysis data used in this study are two or four books by author can be considered as a limitation in that the data analysis was not attempted in sufficient quantities. The application of the writing characteristics applied to the Korean text even though it was an English text also could be limitation. The more diverse stylistic characteristics were limited to six, and the less likely interpretation was also considered as a limitation. In addition, it is also regrettable that the research was conducted by analyzing classical mystery novels rather than text that is commonly used today, and that various classical mystery novel writers were not compared. Subsequent research will attempt to increase the diversity of interpretations by taking into account a wider variety of grammatical systems and stylistic structures and will also be applied to the current frequently used online text analysis to assess the potential for interpretation. It is expected that this will enable the interpretation and definition of the specific structure of the style and that various usability can be considered.