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Distant Reading Fontane

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Network visualization of character interactions in Fontane’s Novel »Effi Briest«

 

We summarize activities and projects that aim at the explorative, partly experimental application of computer-assisted methods of analysis to narrative, lyrical, journalistic and epistolary texts by Theodor Fontane in their historical context under the heading Distant Reading Fontane. The research, which we are conducting in a series of individual projects and studies in cooperation with various partners, is decidedly open-ended. At the same time, the aim is to critically discuss and evaluate the methods and their results.

The project is connected to the research focus ›Digital Literary Studies‹ of the director of the archive Peer Trilcke and is carried out in close cooperation with the Network Digital Humanities at the University of Potsdam.

In a sub-project, we recently collaborated with the curator and literary scholar Heike Gfrereis, who, together with her team, developed and designed art installations for the lead exhibition for the Fontane Year 2019 fontane.200/Autor at the Museum Neuruppin based on our analyses.

Selection of past activities

Image: Juliane Lieschke

Hackathon »The Fontane Code«

In July 2018, at the invitation of the Theodor Fontane Archive, interdisciplinary teams from philology, information science, computational linguistics, and design came together for the (computer) philological hackathon The Fontane Code at Villa Quandt to conduct digital analyses on curated data on Theodor Fontane’s works and writings, to discuss their methods and results with one another, and to try their hand at interpreting these results.

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Image: TFA

»Nachmittagsprediger«. Notable Nouns

One of the stylistic striking features of Fontane’s prose is the invention of original words, especially nominal compounds, i.e. compounds of several nouns. As a rule, these words are particularly rare, and Fontane often uses them only once. In a small digital analysis project, we set out to find these unique nouns - also called Hapax legomena - in Fontane’s novels.

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Image: TFA

Fontane in the Digital Laboratory

Under the heading Fontane im digitalen Labor (Fontane in the digital laboratory), issue 106 of the Fontane Blätter published a series of studies on the digital analysis of Theodor Fontane’s works. The contributions, which were compiled by young scholars from philology and computational linguistics and employ methods such as quantitative stylometry, are devoted to, among other things, direct character speech in Fontane’s novel Effi Briest or the verbs of perception in Fontane’s novel.

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