What automatic indexing and genre classification can bring to fiction

This thesis examines what automatic indexing and genre classification may bring to fiction. The thesis studies five theorists of the subject to find out what the biggest problems are concerning fiction indexing. The thesis also investigates which automatic text analysis methods that can be effective for automatic indexing and genre classifying fiction. To show that it is possible according to philosophy of language to index fiction, in particular to automatically index it. Wittgenstein’s, Barthes’ and Ricoeur’s language and fiction theories are presented and used to problemize the subject. Wittgenstein’s theory is used to show that language finds its meaning in the context, Barthes’ to show that the author is, metaphorically speaking, dead and Ricoeur’s to show that the meaning of the texts uses the readers context to create itself. The thesis concludes that it is probably possible to genre classify fiction, after both aboutness and style. Conversely is it not possible to index fiction automatically after the fictions connective part.Uppsatsnivå: