Reading at Scale
A Digital Analysis of German Novellas from the 19th Century
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Author / Producer
Date
2023-10
Publication Type
Book Chapter
ETH Bibliography
yes
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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 the sensitivity 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.
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Publication status
published
Book title
Mixing Methods
Journal / series
Volume
7
Pages / Article No.
63 - 78
Publisher
Bielefeld University Press
Event
Edition / version
Methods
Software
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Date collected
Date created
Subject
Organisational unit
09610 - Brandes, Ulrik / Brandes, Ulrik