Reading at Scale. A Digital Analysis of German Novellas from the 19th Century (Reading at Scale)
Weitin T, Päpcke S, Herget K, Glawion A, Brandes U (2023)
Publication Language: English
Publication Type: Book chapter / Article in edited volumes
Publication year: 2023
Publisher: Bielefeld University Press
Edited Volumes: Mixing Methods. Practical Insights from the Humanities in the Digital Age
Series: Digital Humanities Research
City/Town: Bielefeld
Book Volume: 7
Pages Range: 63-78
ISBN: 9783837669138
DOI: 10.14361/9783839469132-008
Abstract
The Deutscher Novellenschatz (published in 24 volumes 1871–1876) is a collection of 86 German-language novellas edited by Paul Heyse and Hermann Kurz. It is an example of a medium-sized corpus amenable, in principle, to both, scholarly reading and automated analysis. Our point of departure was the conviction that research questions at intermediate granularity would require the combination of hermeneutic and statistical methods to achieve an appropriate level of abstraction while maintaining a sufficient amount of context. By exposing thesensitivity of text similarity measures to choices in the preparation and evaluation of bag-of-word representations, we highlight the need for consideration of contextual information even in the most distant reading approaches. Literary theory suggested more coarse-grained hypotheses that we tested both empirically in a group of non-expert readers and computationally using similarity of character constellations, respectively. Based on correspondences of the editors and comparison with other corpora, the Novellenschatz was further situated in a historiographic context.
Authors with CRIS profile
Involved external institutions
Technische Universität Darmstadt
Germany (DE)
Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich (ETHZ) / Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich
Switzerland (CH)
Germany (DE)
Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich (ETHZ) / Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich
Switzerland (CH)
How to cite
APA:
Weitin, T., Päpcke, S., Herget, K., Glawion, A., & Brandes, U. (2023). Reading at Scale. A Digital Analysis of German Novellas from the 19th Century (Reading at Scale). In Birgit Schneider, Beate Löffler, Tino Mager, Carola Hein (Eds.), Mixing Methods. Practical Insights from the Humanities in the Digital Age. (pp. 63-78). Bielefeld: Bielefeld University Press.
MLA:
Weitin, Thomas, et al. "Reading at Scale. A Digital Analysis of German Novellas from the 19th Century (Reading at Scale)." Mixing Methods. Practical Insights from the Humanities in the Digital Age. Ed. Birgit Schneider, Beate Löffler, Tino Mager, Carola Hein, Bielefeld: Bielefeld University Press, 2023. 63-78.
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