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Main Authors: Keith, Allison, Castro, Antonio Rojas, Ehrlicher, Hanno, Jung, Kerstin, Padó, Sebastian
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.03895
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author Keith, Allison
Castro, Antonio Rojas
Ehrlicher, Hanno
Jung, Kerstin
Padó, Sebastian
author_facet Keith, Allison
Castro, Antonio Rojas
Ehrlicher, Hanno
Jung, Kerstin
Padó, Sebastian
contents In theatre, playwrights use the portrayal of characters to explore culturally based gender norms. In this paper, we develop quantitative methods to study gender depiction in the non-religious works (comedias) of Pedro Calderón de la Barca, a prolific Spanish 17th century author. We gather insights from a corpus of more than 100 plays by using a gender classifier and applying model explainability (attribution) methods to determine which text features are most influential in the model's decision to classify speech as 'male' or 'female', indicating the most gendered elements of dialogue in Calderón's comedias in a human accessible manner. We find that female and male characters are portrayed differently and can be identified by the gender prediction model at practically useful accuracies (up to f=0.83). Analysis reveals semantic aspects of gender portrayal, and demonstrates that the model is even useful in providing a relatively accurate scene-by-scene prediction of cross-dressing characters.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2411_03895
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Computational Analysis of Gender Depiction in the Comedias of Calderón de la Barca
Keith, Allison
Castro, Antonio Rojas
Ehrlicher, Hanno
Jung, Kerstin
Padó, Sebastian
Computation and Language
In theatre, playwrights use the portrayal of characters to explore culturally based gender norms. In this paper, we develop quantitative methods to study gender depiction in the non-religious works (comedias) of Pedro Calderón de la Barca, a prolific Spanish 17th century author. We gather insights from a corpus of more than 100 plays by using a gender classifier and applying model explainability (attribution) methods to determine which text features are most influential in the model's decision to classify speech as 'male' or 'female', indicating the most gendered elements of dialogue in Calderón's comedias in a human accessible manner. We find that female and male characters are portrayed differently and can be identified by the gender prediction model at practically useful accuracies (up to f=0.83). Analysis reveals semantic aspects of gender portrayal, and demonstrates that the model is even useful in providing a relatively accurate scene-by-scene prediction of cross-dressing characters.
title Computational Analysis of Gender Depiction in the Comedias of Calderón de la Barca
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.03895