ABSTRACT
This chapter relies on tools from digital humanities to gain a deeper understanding of fictional age and the age of the intended reader in the oeuvre of David Almond by studying a large part of his oeuvre simultaneously. Starting off as an author for adults, he never intended to write for a younger readership before publishing Skellig. This raises the question whether there are differences between his books intended for readers of different ages. In the first part of this chapter, Almond’s writing style is studied using stylometric analyses to uncover clustering according to the age of the intended reader. The second part uses two different types of analyses to explore ideologies in terms of age contained within Almond’s fictional characters. First, topic modelling is applied to the speech of characters belonging to specific age groups to study the themes that these characters address. Second, a syntactic parser is used to extract the adjectives, verbs and possessions associated with different age groups. By combining the observations from the three analyses, this chapter highlights the assets digital tools have in terms of reproducibility, objectivity, and uncovering general trends in a large body of texts when employed in the study of age. The efficiency of digital tools when it comes to a large dataset also makes it possible to conduct a variety of analyses in a short span of time to construct a comprehensive picture of this aspect in the oeuvre of David Almond.
