Search

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.)

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.)

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.)

This article explores the rapidly developing field of Critical AI Studies and its relation to issues of class and capitalism through a hybrid approach based on distant reading of a newly collected corpus of 300 full-text scientific articles, the creation of which is itself a first attempt at properly delineating the field. We find that words related to issues of class are predominantly but not exclusively confined to a set of studies that make up their own distinct subfield of Critical AI Studies, in contrast to, e.g., issues of race and gender, which are more broadly present in the corpus.

This article discusses the idea of distant reading and explores the ways in which it can be conducted in research. It focuses especially on how distant reading can contribute to the study of cultural history, which is often regarded as a domain of close reading. The article argues that distant reading methods can successfully be applied in the analysis of cultural transmission in the past, where it is often essential to combine the study of textual signification with the idea of textuality as material flow. The article draws on an example from press history and especially discusses text reuse detection as a strategy for identifying textual amplification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I demonstrate an approach fostering inventive interpretation of short stories in Literary Studies and higher education generally. It involves constructing an 'assemblage'—at its simplest, an evolving network of unusual connections for creative outcome. The assemblage of this article combines freshly located research literature, directly and indirectly related to a story's themes, and/or the personality type of protagonists. Importantly, this assemblage also utilizes text analysis software revealing the relatively invisible (e.g. (in)frequent words, parts of speech, and topics) and Large Language Model (LLM) Generative AI to enrich the interpretation. The use of all these elements helps productively exceed initial intuitions about the story, facilitating creativity. I model the approach using Edgar Allan Poe's short story, The Black Cat , whose protagonist is a homicidal psychopath. Specifically, the assemblage here includes relevant software-based research (a corpus analysis of homicidal psychopathic language), non-software-based research (psychoanalytical literary criticism of The Black Cat using the empirically validated concept of transference), text analysis software (WMatrix and Datayze), and the LLM Generative AI, 'ChatGPT' (using the freely available LLM GPT-3.5). One use of this approach is as a pedagogy in Literary Studies employing text analysis software (e.g. on a digital stylistics course). Yet given creative adaptability is a key 21st-century skill, with digital literacy—including the use of Generative AI—an important contemporary competence, and with the short story genre universally known, I highlight too the utility of this approach as a university-wide pedagogy for enhancing creative thinking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contemporary experiments in Digital Humanities and distant reading tend to propose an empirical approach to literary facts. This development leads us to reflect on the place of quantitative analysis in literary theory, by asking whether data can replace literary theory in the age of Artificial Intelligence (AI)? By shifting from the status of emblematic fact to that of mere "noise" or statistical randomness in data, it is the entire theoretical conception of the literary work, supposedly individual and particular, that is called into question. This article attempts to reflect on these epistemological evolutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The analysis of co-citations, which occurs when two publications or authors are mentioned together in the same text, has long been established as a practice within scientometrics, particularly in the field of "science mapping". However, historiography has shown less openness to utilizing co-citation analysis for distant reading purposes. To address this gap, this article presents a comprehensive methodology for applying co-citation analysis to extensive collections of historical documents, specifically 17th-century letters indexed in the ePistolarium database. In science mapping, co-citation serves as an indicator for tracking the development of scientific fields. Similarly, I employ co-citation to map the Dutch socio-intellectual landscape during the Scientific Revolution period (1623–87) and evaluate the strengths and limitations of this approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This investigation shows that through word embedding and co-occurrence, a researcher can deduce key concepts within a corpus that, with adequate academic contextual knowledge, can guide the investigator to conclude if the corpus belongs to or has been influenced by a particular school of thought. Specifically, we have conducted an extensive analysis of the Journal des Economistes, a prominent platform for the dissemination of ideas within the French Liberal School which run from 1841 to 1936, to demonstrate the effectiveness of these tools in the context of distant reading. We have thus shown how the concepts discussed within the journal, reflect the concerns of the French Liberal School for the concepts of value, commerce, freedom of exchange, freedom, and labor, through statistical methods, as opposed to a close reading of the text. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this note is to explore the theme of language as an object of reception, to highlight the interrelationship between some key concepts, and to sketch, however briefly, a conceptual thread that will allow us to present some of the points of a philosophical and epistemic map of analysis developed by Marine Picon in her volume Norm and Objects of Knowledge.

The aim of this study is to describe the possibilities and limitations of the corpus approach to the analysis of film subtitles, taking into account their technical, social, and culturalnational features. It offers a review of existing film content corpora accompanied by their critical interpretation, firstly from the perspective of subtitle quality as empirical data for linguistic research, and secondly from the perspective of corpus quality as an environment for quantitative analysis of empirical material. Furthermore, based on established subtitling practices, the author proposes her own viewpoint on subtitles as material for studying film speech, considering technical (line length, screen size adaptation), social (subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing), and cultural-national (subtitling countries vs dubbing countries) aspects of subtitling in different languages and countries. In the course of the work, it was found that the largest number of subtitles available in open repositories are translated equivalents of cinema speech. It is noted that subtitling is preferred in the USA, UK, India, China, and Japan. The features of subtitling in countries such as Serbia, Finland, and Russia are described. The author concludes that these features are important for the quality of linguistic research on the basis of translated movie speech represented by subtitles.

In his essay "Sur la Lecture," Roland Barthes (1984) expresses his doubts regarding what he calls "Méta-lecture," or the reading of reading. It is nothing but "un éclat d'idées, de craintes, de désirs, de jouissances, d'oppressions." My essay proposes that the ideas, fears, desires, jouissances and opressions evoked when discussing reading deserve a closer examination. There should be a systematic discussion about the problems of "Méta-lecture." The discourse about reading has its own problems, tropes, and ways of expression. Regardless of where or in what context a text about reading is written, it faces the same fundamental problems in regarding its subject: reading is a black box. Some may even doubt the existence of a common conceptual intersection in the spectrum of practices referred to as reading (Honold/Parr 2018). This highlights the essential indefinability of the concept of reading. What reading is in each case can hardly be reduced to a general concept. This indeterminacy is complicated by the difficulties of observation: reading cannot be isolated as such, but can only be observed as it is performed within specific contexts. Furthermore, this act of observation itself involves reading and is thus always self-reflective. In my essay, I demonstrate the strategies employed by texts on reading from different periods (Ickelsamer 1527, Keyn 1803, Moretti 2013, Wolf 2018) to compensate for the indeterminancy of reading. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study addresses the question of to what extent and how authors' gender is reflected in the textual properties of bestselling fiction in Swedish during the period 2015–2020. The empirical material was a corpus of 235 female-authored books and 214 male-authored works. The analysis of the texts departed from text property measures targeting grammatical and lexical aspects of language use. Differences between the genders were analysed using the probability of superiority measure in combination with a threshold criterion. The results suggest that authors of bestselling fiction in the Swedish book market to a high degree engage in forms of gender performance when they compose their texts. The differences could in most cases be interpreted as conforming to patterns that have previously been reported for other languages and categories of language use. The gender performance to a large extent agreed with traditional stereotypes about the interests of women and men. There were also differences in grammar-related stylistic preferences. Among the female themes, positive emotion and social interaction were prominent. The male examples include weapons and animosity, as well as numerical quantification. A more grammar-related tendency is that male authors tend to package a larger fraction of their text into noun phrases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the digital age, political science is faced with a shift of election campaigns and political discourse to digital or virtual arenas. Because the internet is a highly volatile medium and online content can become inaccessible after the campaign season, new challenges for research arise as well as the need for the preservation of online content. Moreover, the sheer volume of data researchers have to deal with has reached levels where traditional methods are being highly challenged. This paper puts forth a web harvesting workflow with a strong focus on granular extraction of unstructured information (publication dates) for automated analysis. As our approach is methodological, we would like to point out the benefits that researches in political science may draw from adapting our methodology. We demonstrate this by analysing an event-based web crawl of German parties participating in the election campaign for the European Parliamentary Election in 2019. We employ distant reading methods to generate topic models, which are subsequently evaluated by hermeneutic analysis of a subset of the data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Beginning with a full text search for the term 'provincialism' across all entries in the OED Online , this article tracks 'provincialism' through the digitized fiction of the nineteenth century, eavesdropping on the ways in which the term was used in a dataset of references drawn from 165 nineteenth-century novels brought together from the British Library 19th Century Collection and the Hathi Trust Digital Library. The focus is not on a close reading of a small number of novels, a novel subgenre, or iterations of a single novel, but on a close reading of multiple short, references to the term 'provincialism' drawn from a large number of nineteenth-century digitized novels. Attention is concentrated on the textually small, the fleeting yet potent uses of the term deployed by nineteenth-century novelists writing in a mass cultural medium with a local and global reach. The findings offer up a relational and multidimensional picture of the term aggregated from the textually small, as it plays out in relation to class, gender, the city, the four nations of the UK, the British Empire and the wider world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims to decipher distinctive conceptual characteristics attributed to the legendary founder of Ḥasidism, Israel Baʿal Shem Ṭov, as documented by his faithful disciple, Jacob Joseph of Polonnoye (1710–1784). I endeavor to demonstrate how a quantitative analysis of the earliest testimonies of Beshtian teachings can improve our understanding of the interplay between major concepts within these teachings. To achieve this objective, I apply a combination of statistical tools of distant reading with textual analysis of close reading. It will reveal singular characteristics of the reported teachings of the Beshṭ, while distinguishing them from the textual corpus into which they were integrated, Jacob Joseph's writings: Sefer Toldot Yaʿaqov Yosef (1780), Ben Porat Yosef (1781), and Ṣafnat Paʿneaḥ (1782). The results indicate a significant focus on negativity—moral, emotional, and conditional—as well as verbs that offer followers guidance regarding how to overcome these negative aspects of the human experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In his essay “Sur la Lecture,” Roland Barthes (1984) expresses his doubts regarding what he calls “Méta-lecture,” or the reading of reading. It is nothing but “un éclat d’idées, de craintes, de désirs, de jouissances, d’oppressions.” My essay proposes that the ideas, fears, desires, jouissances and opressions evoked when discussing reading deserve a closer examination. There should be a systematic discussion about the problems of “Méta-lecture.” The discourse about reading has its own problems, tropes, and ways of expression. Regardless of where or in what context a text about reading is written, it faces the same fundamental problems in regarding its subject: reading is a black box. Some may even doubt the existence of a common conceptual intersection in the spectrum of practices referred to as reading (Honold/Parr 2018). This highlights the essential indefinability of the concept of reading. What reading is in each case can hardly be reduced to a general concept. This indeterminacy is complicated by the difficulties of observation: reading cannot be isolated as such, but can only be observed as it is performed within specific contexts. Furthermore, this act of observation itself involves reading and is thus always self-reflective. In my essay, I demonstrate the strategies employed by texts on reading from different periods (Ickelsamer 1527, Keyn 1803, Moretti 2013, Wolf 2018) to compensate for the indeterminancy of reading.

Die Verbindungslinien zwischen Digital Humanities (DH) und Literaturdidaktik sind in Anbetracht des geringen Umfangs bisheriger Ansätze nicht unmittelbar evident. Deswegen thematisiert der erste Teil des vorliegenden Beitrags Berührungspunkte für eine weiterführende literatur- und mediendidaktische Auseinandersetzung. Der zweite Teil skizziert ergänzend Parallelen in der Entwicklung von wissenschaftlicher Methodik im Spiegel der Mediengeschichte und fragt, wie man die eigene Forschungsgeschichte erzählt, wozu der Begriff der ‚Schwellisierung‘ vorgeschlagen wird. Auf diesen Grundlagen wird eine Arbeitsdefinition für literaturdidaktische DH erstellt. Der dritte Teil führt schließlich konkrete Beispiele für DH in der Literaturdidaktik mit einem Schwerpunkt auf der rechnergestützten, quantitativen Analyse von Curricula aus (Distant bzw. Scalable Reading). Abstract (english): Moretti goes Didactics. Quantitative Empirical Research, Thresholdisation and Digital Humanities in Literature Didactics (Focus On Distant / Scalable Reading) Connections between digital humanities (DH) and literature didactics appear to be rather scarce so far, at least with regard to the number of existing attempts. Hence, the first part of the paper at hand addresses potential overlaps for an advanced approach in literature and media didactics. The second part outlines further parallels considering the development of scientific methods as reflected in media history and asking how to tell one’s own history of research. In this context, the article proposes to frame such links as processes of ‘thresholdisation’ and outlines a working definition of DH in literature didactics. The third and last part discusses examples of DH against this background focusing on quantitative analyses of curricula (distant and scalable reading respectively).

How do digital media impact the meaning of iconic photographs? Recent studies have suggested that online circulation, especially in a memeified form, might lead to the erosion, fracturing, or collapsing of the original contextual meaning of iconic pictures. Introducing a distant reading methodology to the study of iconic photographs, we apply the Google Cloud Vision Application Programming Interface (GCV API) to retrieve 940,000 online circulations of 26 iconic images between 1995 and 2020. We use document embeddings, a Natural Language Processing technique, to map in what contexts iconic photographs are circulated online. The article demonstrates that constantly changing configurations of contextual imagetexts, self-referential image-texts, and non-referential image/texts shape the online live of iconic photographs: ebbs and flows of slowly disappearing, suddenly resurfacing, and newly found meanings. While iconic photographs might not need captions to speak, this article argues that a large-scale analysis of texts can help us better grasp what they say. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Data science deals with the discovery of information from large volumes of data. The data studied by scientists in the humanities include large textual corpora. An important objective is to study the ideas and expectations of a society regarding specific concepts, like "freedom" or "democracy," both for today's society and even more for societies of the past. Studying the meaning of words using large corpora requires efficient systems for text analysis, so-called distant reading systems. Making such systems efficient calls for a specification of the necessary functionality and clear expectations regarding typical work loads. But this currently is unclear, and there is no benchmark to evaluate distant reading systems. In this article, we propose such a benchmark, with the following innovations: As a first step, we collect and structure various information needs of the target users. We then formalize the notion of word context to facilitate the analysis of specific concepts. Using this notion, we formulate queries in line with the information needs of users. Finally, based on this, we propose concrete benchmark queries. To demonstrate the benefit of our benchmark, we conduct an evaluation, with two objectives. First, we aim at insights regarding the content of different corpora, i.e., whether and how their size and nature (e.g., popular and broad literature or specific expert literature) affect results. Second, we benchmark different data management technologies. This has allowed us to identify performance bottlenecks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the complexities of creating an archive – in our case, a digital archive of eighteenth-century manuscript letters, The Elizabeth Montagu Correspondence Online (EMCO). Elizabeth Montagu was one of the most prominent and well-connected women in eighteenth-century polite society. EMCO faces a variety of challenges. Firstly, the project aims to trace all extant letters in different libraries and public/private collections; secondly, it seeks to amalgamate the extant correspondence into one digital repository and a comprehensive inventory; thirdly, it mobilises a team of scholars to transcribe, annotate and develop a critical apparatus; fourthly, EMCO seeks to develop digital tools that foster novel methods of scholarly research and debate. Taking recent scholarship on board, this article concludes by reflecting on the complexities of marrying a data-rich digital edition with literary methodologies that allow both close reading and analysis of the scope and materiality of the archive and its objects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research shows that teachers and education are often represented negatively or stereotypically in popular and literary culture, both in the Dutch language area and in Anglophone contexts. Regarding contemporary Dutch literature, though, research on educational representations has until now focussed on small corpora of novels that explicitly deal with education. In this article, we explore the representations of teachers and education in a much larger and broader corpus: the 170 submissions to the bulk list of the prestigious Dutch Libris Literatuurprijs of 2013. We provide a Keyword in Context Analysis of 292 educational representations in this corpus and offer a demographic analysis of the 71 teachers who inhabit the novels under analysis. In doing so, we show that educational representations and teacher characters are relatively common in contemporary Dutch language novels. Our analysis also reveals that literary representations of teachers are predominantly negative in nature, especially regarding their behaviour towards students, their external presentation, and their pedagogical skills. Representations of education in general tend to be even more negative. In that sense, literary representations of education appear to converge with the negative public appeal of the educational sector in the contemporary Low Countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"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]

In this paper, we investigate the common narrative in literary history that the inner lives of characters became a central preoccupation of literary modernism – a phenomenon commonly referenced as the “inward turn”. We operationalize this notion via a proxy, tracing the use of verbs relating to inner life across 10 language corpora from the ELTeC collection, which comprises novels from the period between 1840–1920. We expected to find an increase in the use of inner-life verbs corresponding to the traditional periodisation of modernism in each of the languages. However, different experiments conducted with the data do not confirm this hypothesis. We therefore look at the results in a number of more granular ways, but we cannot identify any common trends even when we split the verbs into individual categories, or take canonicity or gender into account. We discuss the obtained results in detail, proposing potential reasons for them and including potential avenues of further research as well as lessons learned.

New digital methods are currently enhancing the historian’s toolbox fundamentally. This thematic issue is a collection of papers discussing case studies in the fields of digitization, optical character recognition, distant reading, text mining, network analysis, and historical geographical information systems. The papers discuss opportunities and limitations in the application of digital methods in historical studies and point out fields of future applications.

Case studies in Britain, Canada, and the United States illustrate the wide range of projects using tools and techniques associated with the digital humanities that are expanding the scope and scale of enquiry in tourism and travel histories. Discussions about their research programmes with key figures associated with the development of these tools reveal a set of common interests, ambitions, and limitations, as well as ways in which digital humanities approaches can be incorporated profitably within projects to advance theoretical paradigms, related to spatialities and post-colonial studies, for instance.

The article examines reports of natural disasters in the 18th century Austrian newspaper "Wienerisches Diarium" to gain insights into how people captured the extraordinary sensory experiences of such events in written form. By analysing a digitised corpus of over 300 newspaper issues, the study identifies 302 text passages referring to natural disasters, among them 285 news reports, and explores textual traces of (multi)sensuality present within this material. The close reading and semantic annotation of the textual findings reveals that comparisons to familiar sensations are commonly used to convey the sensory experiences of natural disasters, allowing readers to (better) relate to and understand the extreme events. At the same time, touch and vision constitute the most frequently mentioned senses, while smell and taste only play a minor role in early modern disaster depiction. In addition, the study finds that earthquakes and volcanic eruptions are more likely to include multisensory descriptions compared to other types of disasters. These and further findings shed light on when and how (multi)sensory impressions of disasters were conveyed in written form within early modern news. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the ways in which distant reading, as a facet of the digital turn in the humanities, has affected the study of literature, with particular attention to the ways the digital turn has impacted the examination of authorship, genre, and style. In the process, it reflects on the ways in which distant reading developed both as a concept in the history of world literature and as a methodological approach that contributed to the evolution of computer-assisted study of literature.Cet article examine les façons dont la lecture à distance, en tant que facette du virage numérique dans les sciences humaines, a affecté l’étude de la littérature, avec une attention particulière aux façons dont le virage numérique a influencé l’examen de la paternité, le genre et le style. Dans le processus, il réfléchit sur les façons dont la lecture à distance a développé à la fois comme un concept dans l’histoire de la littérature mondiale et comme une approche méthodologique qui a contribué à l’évolution de l’étude assistée par ordinateur de la littérature.

This article describes the use of “Voyant Tools”, an open access text analysis application, to examine a corpus of articles from open access journals, dealing with the topic of digital humanities. The corpus consisted of 404 articles recorded in the “Clarivate Analytics Web of Science” and “Scopus ScienceDirect” databases. The authors discuss how “Voyant Tools” aids to identify the dominant fields of research through quantitative methods and to reveal the main discourse themes using distant reading and interactive reading capabilities. They also identify some problems encountered during the analyses, and also discuss the usefulness of data visualization for research and interpretation. Computer tools can be useful for experienced researchers who are interested in quantitative text analysis, as well as for beginners, as it provides an opportunity to acquire basic knowledge that will lead to a deeper interest in textual analysis methods. [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]

Copyright of Medien & Kommunikationswissenschaft is the property of Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft mbH & Co. KG 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 article employs distant reading to examine discursive norms for expressing emotion in comments on Harry Potter fanfiction on Archive of Our Own (AO3). Using text analysis tools to identify collocational patterns, the article shows how fanfiction engages this community and how community members express their engagement in accordance with community discourses. The analysis transcends the level of individual utterances by examining large-scale patterns in the data. Comparing comments for three fanfiction genres (angst, fluff and hurt/comfort) reveals three patterns. First, commenters frequently describe stories about suffering in positive terms. Second, metaphors likening fanfiction consumption to food consumption are prevalent in all genres. Commenters also use language blending physical and emotional sensations. Finally, commenters describe stories about positive emotions using negative metaphors of rot, decay, gluttony or overload. This use of positive or negative language need not indicate positive or negative judgements but instead reveals discursive fields to which fanfiction reading is linked. Additionally, comments indicate that fanfiction is used to influence emotional states. These findings contribute to an understanding of the impact of fanfiction within its community and raise questions regarding the role of emotion in fanfiction reading. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we investigate the common narrative in literary history that the inner lives of characters became a central preoccupation of literary modernism. We operationalise this notion via a proxy, tracing the use of verbs relating to inner life across 10 language corpora from the ELTeC collection, which comprises novels from the period between 1840–1920. We expected to find an increase in the use of inner-life verbs corresponding to the traditional periodisation of modernism in each of the languages. However, different experiments conducted with the data do not confirm this hypothesis. We therefore look at the results in a number of more granular ways, but we cannot identify any common trends even when we split the verbs into individual categories, or take canonicity or gender into account. We discuss the obtained results in detail, proposing potential reasons for them and including potential avenues of further research as well as lessons learned.

Through mixed research methods combining new historicism and digital humanities with distant reading techniques assisted by the application of AntConc and new historicism, this research will show the reconstruction of Jakarta's history in the collection of poems From Batavia to Jakarta (1619–1999) by Zeffry J. Alkatiri. The research results show that; history is reconstructed through the physical structure of narrative poetry, with the dominance of the use of the compound pronoun class "they", as well as intra-sentence conjunctions and prepositions such as: "and", "in", and "the", instead of using licentia poetica that is able to violate the rules of language in general; despite being assisted by AntConc, in several subchapters of structural analysis such as typography, figure of speech metaphor, hyperbole, and personification, the application has not been able to detect it, so manual analysis is still required; the history of Jakarta is reconstructed by Alkatiri through four discourses (violence, the struggle against colonialism, Betawi and peranakan culture, and Jakarta as a city) which portray identity in each of its discourses, from racial, class, to city identities. This reconstruction is marked by the emergence of the words "child" and "person" as markers of certain identities.

The article overviews general principles of diffractive reading, an approach to literary studies inspired by Karen Barad’s agential realism. Barad’s concept is characterized by inclusiveness and interdisciplinarity; it does not represent a rigorous research method, but rather a specific way of viewing literature as an integral part of the ontological/ material structure of reality. In this view, a literary work is not so much awork specifically human and independent but a dynamic space of intra-actions both between human and non-human agents. The article considers the diffractive reading project in the context of the current paradigm shift in the humanities (Domańska), and in relation to Franco Moretti’s idea of distant reading. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

French novels of the 19th century recall the aspects of food culture in different ways through their reflections on the golden age for both gastronomy and the pleasures of the table. La Comédie Humaine is a milestone in highlighting the keystones of French food and gastronomy. In this study, we propose a multistage analysis of 21 novels of La Comédie Humaine by examining the food terms and their translations into English and Turkish. Our main contribution is the qualitative and quantitative analysis of food in the Balzacian context. We have performed food data visualization from original and translated texts and thus revealed how the terms for beverages and mealtimes are interconnected in the Comédie Humaine and how food translations might differ in English and Turkish, especially the names of wine, coffee terms and mealtime names. We provide a contextualized food approach to Balzac's novels through the lens of Turkish and English culture revealing their openness, or not, to French food culture, linked to the rules of prestige and the habitus of the target culture. We started our analysis by localizing food patterns in the source language. Then we analyzed them in distant reading – analysis of quantitative data – and close reading focused on the qualitative analysis. This mixed methodology gives a new layer of insight and could be extrapolated to other texts and languages in the domain of food and literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article for the first time tests some methods of distant reading on the material of KarachayBalkarian novels. The object of the study is the texts of 55 fiction works in the Karachay-Balkar language (mainly novels). Based on the analyzed texts, as well as some related meta-information, conclusions are drawn about the dynamics of publication activity in relation to Karachay-Balkarian novels - in particular, an unprecedented decrease in such activity since 2011 is indicated (only two published novels were found during this period). For the first time, the method Delta for calculation of intertextual distances (together with tree-like clusterization) was applied to the samples of Karachay-Balkarian literature, once again confirming its high efficiency. In addition to the unmistakable attribution of the analyzed texts, the generated tree structure is characterized by the presence of two branches (Karachay and Balkarian), as well as two sub-branches within the Balkarian branch. At the same time, intraBalkarian dialects are not revealed on the tree. The chronological principle has been found: the work located the furthest on the tree from the other works of the same author is always published either earlier than all the others, or later than all the others.

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.

In this case study we discuss different approaches to the study of literature in digital humanities and try to join two methodologies, namely distant reading and spatial analysis. We first describe shortly the two projects involved, the Atlas of Literary Landscapes of Mainland Portugal and Literateca, highlighting and quantifying the different ways to deal with place in literature in Portuguese. Then we describe some different paths to compare and harmonize the two approaches, focusing on annotation, extraction and geocoding of place names. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]