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"Archives" and "distant reading" have become common concepts in literary criticism following the mass digitization of books and newspapers. Though these two sources provide gigantic amounts of data available in digitized collections and catalogues, they rarely encompass all printed texts preserved from any given period. A third type is mostly left out: ephemeral prints. This poses a problem for literary bibliographies. The major Danish collection holds 6 kilometers of rarely registered prints. The article shows how to catalogue and then analyze metadata from 825 printed songs circulating in what was then a major venue in the Danish public sphere: the Royal Copenhagen Shooting Association. Following Katherine Bode's proposals for writing data‐rich literary history, I first sum up collection policies in Scandinavian national libraries. The following questions are then examined: How did ephemera circulate inside the association and in the broader public? Which agents were involved in song‐production? How many of these occasional songs entered the authoritative Collected Works on which scholars often rely—and in which forms? Might political contexts explain fluctuations in the number of songs printed and the choice of foreign melodies? In most cases, the overview gained by quantitative analysis facilitates the subsequent closer, qualitative analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Keywords: Computer Vision; Distant Viewing; Distant Reading; Digital Art History EN Computer Vision Distant Viewing Distant Reading Digital Art History 1 5 5 11/02/23 20230701 NES 230701 Introduction While digital literary studies are well established, digital art history is only taking its first baby steps. We review the literature to identify similarities in goals and challenges in digital art history and digital literary studies and how the experience of the latter can help to define research questions most suitable for using machine-aided vision in art history. This essay primarily relies on the articles on digital art history ([26], [12][5]), critique of the quantitative approach in art history ([25]), and theoretical and methodological inquiries on digital literary studies ([32][23][8]). Digital Art History and Digital Literary studies Digital art history and digital literary studies are the disciplines under the umbrella term of digital humanities - an area broadly described as an intersection of humanities disciplines and computing or digital technologies [10][7]. [Extracted from the article]

The article aims to present the creation of the text corpus of short prose by Latvian women writers and a pilot study on the distribution of body words in the corpus. The corpus development is a part of the research process, which aligns with the goals and perspectives of feminist literary history. First, the paper introduces the design of the corpus. Consisting of 259 texts, published between 1893 and 2002, it is the first literary corpus focusing on Latvian women writers and on short prose. Given that short forms have long dominated women's prose, this focus was a conscious decision to highlight women's contribution to writing. Further, the article presents the methods of distant reading that were applied to identify the distribution of body words in the texts. The desire to reintroduce women into the history of literature has also led to a focus on the body. While writing is mediated through the body, it is also a space to explore and take possession of the body. Finally, by combining the results of distant reading with examples of close reading, the distribution of body words in different periods is compared. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, Romanian literary studies took one of its major methodological turns toward distant reading, using either or both quantitative and computational analysis. While quantitative analysis employed lexicographical instruments such as dictionaries and literary chronologies, computational analysis tried to approach the issue from a "data rich" historical perspective (Katherine Bode), while also attempting to build a digital corpus adapted to computational methods. The following paper attempts to survey the main research projects that deal with the computational analysis of Romanian literature in general and the Romanian novel in particular. The first part of the study undertakes a succinct state-of-the-art on past and ongoing endeavours concerned with digital approaches to the study of Romanian literature, their initial findings and potential. The second part will take a more theoretic approach to some of the key concepts related to data supported literary history. Finally, the last part of the study tackles the main challenges of developing a digital corpus of a local literature and the shortcomings related to this literature's "locality" in terms of computational approaches and the compatibility of the tools developed by Western research projects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Literary critics value the process of "close reading" which involves focused word-by-word and lineby- line reading of a literary work to derive meaning from the entire corpus and establish the role of different aspects of text in this process. As this strategy may yield previously unnoticed connotations, it is rarely performed using computer software. Although this is a widely established view, in this paper, we posit that "distant reading" using an appropriate combination of automatic/computer-assisted analytical methods can still achieve this purpose. While we do not undermine the value of the traditional process, we demonstrate that a detailed visualization of the literary work in focus (in our case a poem by William Wordsworth) through digital tools like "transpoemation" could augment the literary analysis process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I make the connection between three concepts with a very obvious ideological core - kitsch, posthumanism and what defines Franco Moretti through distant reading. All these theoretical representations are reflected differently in cultural realities. The aim is to identify in literary criticism called distant reading a symptomatic form of the radicalization of posthumanist ideology, by assuming a discourse and thinking specific to kitsch. Distant reading is thus about to transform from a theory of academic communities, into a form of popular culture, in the sense given to the concept of American multiculturalism. Therefore, the analysis focuses mainly on the concept of distant reading, launched by Franco Moretti. Kitsch and posthumanism are instrumentalized and evoked extremely summarily, from a critical perspective necessary for an effort to problematize the consanguine connection between distant reading and posthumanist kitsch. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on distant reading approaches and the ways literary studies can use these for research of various semantic fields of authors' corpora (or subcorpora). It provides a closer look at the methodological facets of these approaches, evaluates their adequacy and the possibilities of implementation of chosen linguistic methods in literary studies. These aspects are reflected in polemics with methods and conclusions presented in Richard Změlík's Konceptualizace barev v narativní fikci na pozadí kvantitativních modelů ([Conceptualisations of colours in narrative fiction on the background of quantitative models] Olomouc: Univerzita Palackého, 2019, 320 pp.), in which the author employed the methodology of distant reading on the corpus of fiction written by the Czech writer Jan Čep (1902 - 1973). The paper aims at contributing to a wider discussion on quantitative methods of distant reading, their application in literary studies and the creation of authors' specialised and general reference representative literary corpora. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article takes as its topic quantitative approaches used in the study of literature. In the field of digital humanities, these are most readily represented by the method of distant reading developed by Franco Moretti. The aim of the article is to evaluate the possibilities and challenges the given method poses. At the same time, it wishes to offer new solutions with regards to the explanation of the seemingly asymmetrical quantitative data in the context of possible interpretations of a work of literature from the perspective of cognitive literary studies. Reflections presented in the paper are based on Richard Změlík's quantitative research. In his methodologically-centred monograph Konceptualizace barev v narativní fikci na pozadí kvantitativních modelů ([Conceptualisations of colours in narrative fiction on the background of quantitative models] Olomouc: Univerzita Palackého, 2019, 320 pp.), he summarised the distant reading of colour semantics in the fiction of the Czech writer Jan Čep (1902 - 1973). A close critical reading of Změlík's research reveals strengths and weaknesses of the method he employed. Greatest attention is paid to developing supplementary conclusions regarding the reading of Čep's book Modrá a zlatá [Blue and gold]. The collection of short stories works with specific colour semantics and as such presents a challenge to the quantitative method employed by Změlík. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Any expansion of the TEI beyond its traditional user base involves a recognition that there are many differing answers to the traditional question "What is text, really?" We report on some work carried out in the context of the COST Action Distant Reading for European Literary History (CA16204), in particular on the TEI-conformant schemas developed for one of its principal deliverables: the European Literary Text Collection (ELTeC). The ELTeC will contain comparable corpora for each of at least a dozen European languages, each being a balanced sample of one hundred novels from the period 1840 to 1920, together with metadata concerning their production and reception. We hope that it will become a reliable basis for comparative work in data-driven textual analytics. The focus of the ELTeC encoding scheme is not to represent texts in all their original complexity, nor to duplicate the work of scholarly editors. Instead, we aim to facilitate a richer and betterinformed distant reading than a transcription of lexical content alone would permit. At the same time, where the TEI encourages diversity, we enforce consistency by permitting representation of only a specific and quite small set of textual features, both structural and analytical. These constraints are expressed by a master TEI ODD, from which we derive three different schemas by ODD chaining, each associated with appropriate documentation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper deals with problems of building representative digital literary collections of national literatures, in particular those of Slovak and Ukrainian literatures, within the international context of the project European Literary Text Collection (ELTeC). At the beginning text characterizes the requirements laid down on creation and representativeness of such a national multilingual literary collection, which is established as a result of the project COST - Distant Reading for European Literary History (1840 - 1920) and analyzes various factors related to literary production in Slovakia and Ukraine. On the one hand, it includes a discrepancy between stronger partners of the project (socalled great European literatures) and weaker partners (so-called small literatures), on the other hand, the factor of accessibility of digital sources corresponding to the requirements of a project of this kind. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the last decades, the significant increase in digital resources has initiated research into the humanities and social sciences that is based on data, technology, and quantitative statistical methods. What all this research has in common is the concept of the digital humanities (hereinafter referred to as DH), which has even influenced the classic and perhaps most common approach to knowledge in the humanities - reading. Extensive digitisation of manuscripts, books, magazines, and other texts into electronic corpora has created a need not only to rethink and redefine the concept of reading and its variations (especially in relation to close reading and distant reading), but also to specify the methodology and possibilities of digital text analysis. This monographic edition of Slovenská literatúra aims to present digital literary research in the wider context of specific research programmes, projects, and infrastructures. This edition has been published with the support of the Slovak Academy of Sciences provided as part of the international scientific and technical cooperation project COST Action CA 16204: Distant Reading for European Literary History (1840 - 1920). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The creation of poems via neural networks is relatively easy nowadays and the internet is replete with corresponding examples. However, it largely lacks interpretive concepts. What should be done with the results generated in this way? How can we draw scientific conclusions from them? This is all the more difficult to answer as it still remains unclear where to position deep‐learning approaches in the canon of digital‐humanities methods. But it is clear that humanities scholars must reckon with machines being responsible for, or at least involved in, the creation of their objects of study. After a historical introduction to automated poetry generation, we try to conceptualize neural‐net poetry and argue that its interpretation, i.e. the close reading of texts generated that way, based on large source corpora, can be an insightful addition to the toolbox of computational literary studies, an approach in development that we suggest calling "neural reading." Our main argument is that artificial neural networks are able to reproduce parts of the stylistic features of a training sample, in our case poetic corpora, acting as a kind of digital echo chamber of literary history. These features are mainly observed in smaller language units, at the level of morphology, vocabulary, syntax, and prosody. Our findings open new directions for the study of style in larger corpora. We will illustrate this with three Russian corpora (a selection of translated hexameters from the eighteenth to the twentieth century and the poetry of Natalia Azarova and Vladimir Vysotsky) and one German corpus (collected poems of Friedrich Hölderlin). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Definitions of digital abound at the present time, but there is a thread amongst the most vital of these that questions the relevance of human agency and evaluative choice. If we follow where technological advances take us we come to the unsettling conclusion that 'machine reading' has usurped more analogue procedures and that algorithmic formulae have supplanted human judgement; the opportunities that new software provide can outstrip our imagination in framing research questions. Literary history, however, addresses how we might make sense of the One as well as the Many, and, when confronted by a string of word- or phrase-patterns, it is not that our findings speak for themselves; we have to conjure their value. This is exemplified by analysing where some digital searches might take us in relation to Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice, basing the reading on all the repetitions of gentile/gentle, kind, and credit. The sensitive interrogation of the play's electronic text does point us to salient 'returns' and patterning signalled by following where the significant iterations of these words might take us, but what we make of these lines of enquiry eventually calls on human evaluation and volition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses four history plays, published between 1837 and 1869 in Sweden and Finland, and asks how the playwrights of the early nineteenth century represented the same premodern episode: the unsuccessful peasant uprising called the Club War (1596–1597). The focus is on the plays' dramatis personae, and the article will make comparable suggestions of the themes and topics each protagonist brings to the stage. The article studies literary factors that contributed to the persistent afterlife and continuous cultural resonance of these dramatic events, and addresses the dynamics between historical fiction and scholarly history in the production of collectively meaningful pasts. As one of the results the paper demonstrates that a somewhat surprising historical hero surfaced when the 1590s were adapted in the context of a new nationalism. Methodologically the article combines computational distant reading and more traditional close reading to disclose the core characters of each play individually, and, taken together, of the early fictional 'story space' of the event. The article argues that even such small‐scale investigations can benefit from the systematic analytical tools offered by digital humanities that can reveal wholly new facets of the texts that more traditional literary history may overlook. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Studia Universitatis Babes-Bolyai, Philologia is the property of Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This essay re-reads Roxanne Lapidus's translation of Pierre Lévy's "La Lecture artificielle" in the context of recent developments in the field of literary criticism, particularly in relation to the emergence of computer-based interpretative practices and text-creation programs, examining the ways in which such activities can be considered to be "artificial". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Comparative Literature / Primerjalna Književnost is the property of Slovenian Comparative Literature Association and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The study discusses several major implications of the book written by Franco Moretti and entitled Graphs. Maps. Trees (2005, 2007), which proposes a series of abstract models ("diagrams") for literary history devised by way of a "distant reading," namely, a Bergsonian-Deleuzian rather than a Hegelian-Marxist or positivist historiographical approach to (literary) history. We are dealing here with a reading (interpretation) which sees (literary) history as "creative evolution," vital, dynamic, "rhizomatic," lacking finality, but featuring multiple evolutionary tendencies. Reading (interpretation) seeks to find in texts precisely the kernels of the new evolutionary tendencies, outlining the diagrams, the "maps" of the multiple fictional worlds, irreducible to a single, "true," exhaustive representation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]