Program "Trends datengetriebene Geisteswissenschaften"

Semesterplan

• Do, 05.11.2020 18:30 Auftakt! Shorter webex meeting, followed by joint attendance of evening session of EXC2020 workshop “What is the digital doing” (19:00-21:00)

• Do, 19.11.2020 Colloquium findet nicht statt wegen JBH Habilitationsvortrag in Basel

• Do, 03.12.2020 18:15 Matthew Wilkens (Cornell): "Computational approaches to large-scale literary geography"

• Do, 17.12.2020 18:15 Anne-Sophie Bories (Basel): "Exploring Verse and Jokes"
  

• Do, 14.01.2021 18:15 Emily Troscianko (Oxford) and James Carney (London): “A picture held us captive”: Imagery, perspective, and the text–mind connection in Kafka's Schloß

• FREITAG, 29.01.2021 morgens/vormittags (time to be announced) Kath Bode: “Shift from representational to performative approaches to data”

• Do, 11.02.2021 18:15 - 19:45 Matt Erlin (St. Louis) and Andrew Piper (Montreal): “Cultural Capitals: Modeling ‘Minor’ European Literature”
  
  
  

Abstracts and Readings

 "Computational approaches to large-scale literary geography"
Matthew Wilkens

Many areas of literary studies are concerned with questions of geography and national identity. By using digital libraries and computational techniques, we can address these areas in new ways. How, for example, did writing by migrants to Britain differ from that of their native-born peers in the years before World War II? Are American authors less international in their geographic outlook than are writers from other nations? To which kinds of social, political, and economic events does literature most directly respond? This talk will answer all of these questions, describe the specific methods involved, and offer suggestions for future research in the field.

Matthew Wilkens is Associate Professor of Information Science at Cornell University (USA). His work uses quantitative and computational methods to study large-scale developments in literary and cultural history. He is the director of the Textual Geographies project, a founding editorial board member of the Journal of Cultural Analytics, and the author of Revolution: The Event in Postwar Fiction.

Reading:

"Exploring Verse and Jokes"

Anne-Sophie Bories

What might humour and verse have to do with each other? Jokes and poetry seem to sit at opposite ends of a conventional hierarchy of literary forms. Yet, they share a strong history of joint appearances, and one can also liken some of their features. Both humour and poetry gladly violate Grice’s maxims, harnessing language’s shortcomings to produce just the desired amount of ambiguity, presenting us with the pleasure of overlapping or deceptive meanings. Both carefully build their tempo, often towards a climactic moment that French describes with one word for both domains: la chute, literally the fall.

The research team « Mining the Comic Verse » (Le Rire des vers ) is funded for 5 years by the Swiss National Science Foundation, developing tools to address issues of versification and joke-like patterns together.

Anne-Sophie Bories received her PhD from Université Paris 3 – Sorbonne Nouvelle, after being a visiting researcher at University of California, Berkeley, and at University of Leeds. Her works on poetry take advantage of computational and statistic methods to blend close and distant reading, and address issues of poetics and stylistics. She published a monography in 2020 titled Des Chiffres et des mètres, focused on Raymond Queneau’s poetry. Anne-Sophie is the founder of a network of researchers in computational stylistics, named “Plotting Poetry” which gathers once a year in Europe for a conference.

She is now leading a team at the University of Basel, to explore the interactions between humour and versification in large, digitised corpus, thanks to a generous grant awarded for 5 years by the Swiss National Science Foundation.

Reading:

“A picture held us captive”: Imagery, perspective, and the text–mind connection in Kafka's Schloß
Emily Troscianko and James Carney

We present findings from an experiment on reader responses to the first paragraph of Kafka’s novel Das Schloß (in English translation). Specifically, we tested the effect of Kafka’s own manuscript edits by comparing responses to the published version of the text relative to an earlier draft. Our methods were designed to balance the need for structured data and unbiased analysis with freedom of reader response, and involved:

• analysing participants’ pencil drawings of their imaginative experience for presence/absence of specific features (K. and the castle) and for global entropy values;
• using word embeddings to perform cluster analysis of participants’ free-response testimony on the differences between their drawing and their imaginative experience, in order to generate thematic clusters free of experimenter bias.

We offer our conclusions on the effects of Kafka's textual strategies, and make suggestions for how experimental literary studies might overcome some longstanding difficulties.

Emily Troscianko is a Research Associate at The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities (TORCH) with research interests spanning the cognitive and health humanities and a monograph, Kafka’s Cognitive Realism (2014), that makes the case for scientifically informed approaches to response phenomena like “the Kafkaesque”. She is also a coach and writer, and runs an academic writing programme for the humanities at Oxford.

James Carney is Associate Professor at the London Interdisciplinary School. His research sits at the intersection of interpretive, experimental, and computational methods, and he has published widely across the humanities and quantitative social sciences. At present, he is interested in the application of methods from deep learning to the wider cultural record, but with the input of cognitive science. He is also founding director of Texture AI, an NLP-focused data science company.

“Cultural Capitals: Modeling ‘Minor’ European Literature”

Matt Erlin and Andrew Piper

Conceived against the backdrop of ongoing debates regarding the status of national literary traditions in world literature, this essay offers a computational analysis of how national attention is distributed in contemporary fiction across multiple national contexts. Building on the work of Pascale Casanova, we ask how different national literatures engage with national themes and whether this engagement can be linked to one's position within a global cultural hierarchy. Our data consists of digital editions of 200 works of prize-winning fiction, divided into four subcorpora of equal size: U.S.-American, French, German, and a collection of novels drawn from 19 different "minor" European languages.

Matt Erlin is professor of German and Comparative Literature at Washington University in St. Louis, where he is a founding member of the Humanities Digital Workshop. He is the co-editor of the collection Distant Readings: Topographies of German Culture in the Long Nineteenth Century (2014) as well as the author of several articles on digital humanities and computational literary analysis.

Andrew Piper is Professor and William Dawson Scholar in the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at McGill University. He is the director of .txtLAB, a laboratory for cultural analytics and editor of the Journal of Cultural Analytics. He is the author most recently of Can We Be Wrong? The Problem of Textual Evidence in a Time of Data (Cambridge, 2020).

Reading: