The Stylometry of Film Dialogue: Pros and Pitfalls

We examine film dialogue with quantitative textual analysis (stylometry, sentiment analysis, distant reading). Working with transcribed dialogue in almost 300 productions, we explore the complex way in which most-frequent-words-based stylometry and lexicon-based sentiment analysis produce patterns of similarity and difference between screenwriters and/or a priori IMDB-defined genres. In fact, some of our results show that counting and comparing very frequent word lists reveals further similarities: of theme, implied audience, stylistic patternings. The results are encouraging enough to suggest that such quantitative approach to film dialogue may become a welcome addition to the arsenal of film studies methodology.