This research project has been developed during the summer school in Digital Humanities hosted by the University of Bergamo (Italy) in conjunction with the Fairleigh Dickinson University (NJ) (June/July 2022). My name is Beatrice Bertoni and I am a student at the University of Bergamo, where I am currently doing a bachelor’s degree in Modern Languages and Literatures.

The aim of my project is to investigate the characterization of the five main characters of M. E. Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret through a corpus-based analysis of dialog. This website has been created ad hoc to present my project and show my findings.

In my research project I argue that the speech of each character reveals something about their identity. For this purpose, I have compiled and analyzed five corpora, one for the speech of each of the five main characters of the novel: Lady Audley, Robert Audley, George Talboys, Alicia Audley, and Sir Michael Audley. The analysis of the five corpora has been conducted on Voyant-tools.org, a website for analyzing digital texts, and on Wordclouds.com, a tool for creating word clouds. Each section contains both the graphs and the word clouds created with these tools and a clear, step-by-step explanation of the findings.

While building this website, I have followed the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) to ensure that its content is accessible to all users. Last but not least, the future research page provides suggestions for future research in this field, which is situated at the intersection of corpus linguistics and literary stylistics.