Toponyms as Entry Points into a Digital Edition: Mapping Die Fackel

The emergence of Spatial Humanities has prompted for interdisciplinary work on digitized texts, especially since the significance of place names exceeds the usually admitted frame of deictic and indexical functions. In this perspective, I present a visualization of toponyms co-occurrences in the literary journal Die Fackel ("The Torch"), published by the satirist and language critic Karl Kraus in Vienna from 1899 until 1936. The distant reading experiments consist in drawing lines on maps in order to uncover patterns which are not easily retraceable during close reading. I discuss their status in the context of a digital humanities study. This is not an authoritative cartography of the work but rather an indirect depiction of the viewpoint of Kraus and his contemporaries. Drawing on Kraus' vitriolic recording of political life, toponyms in Die Fackel tell a story about the ongoing reconfiguration of Europe.