Dostoevsky and the Word “Jew”: A Quantitative Analysis of F.M. Dostoevsky’s Greatest Novels

The relationship of F.M Dostoevsky with Jews attracted the attention of numerous scholars throughout the years, many of whom attempted to grapple with the views of the great writer and their origin. In this article we will attempt to show this relationship by analyzing six of Dostoevsky’s greatest novels, written through the entirety of his career. We are analyzing these novels using Distant Reading in conjunction with Close Reading, tools that are commonly used in the field of digital humanities, which enabled us to show visually the extent of F.M. Dostoevsky’s engagement with this topic. The study poses two research questions: 1. To what extent did the writer use the more denigrating term “Zhid”? 2. Can we see a correlation between the writer’s portrayal of Jews with the definition of Anti-Semitism as it was known during his era? The obtained results show that there is clearly a correlation between the definition of anti-Semitism as it was understood at the time of Dostoevsky and the “Jew” as depicted in his novels, as the financial motif is paramount in the depiction of Jews as this is the central topic in 49% of the negative sentences in which the word “Jew” appears, with 59% of these sentences classified as stereotypes. The negative financial stereotype constitutes 32% of the entire corpus. In addition, we found the term “Zhid” is commonly used by the writer, a variation of which constitutes 75% of the total terms used to depict Jews.

Naming and Renaming Texts: Rubrics in Middle High German Miscellany Manuscripts

This article analyses rubrics in Middle High German miscellany manuscripts of short texts in rhyming couplets (Reimpaargedichte). A corpus consisting of 1433 rubrics from 68 manuscripts was created to be able to perform this study. As rubrics in medieval manuscripts were not authorial, but composed by scribes, they offer insights into the reception of the texts. This paper analyses their features and functions as a proxy to interrogate the standing and status of Reimpaargedichte between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries. The main methodology is distant reading, i.e. the application and interpretation of statistical methods on a textual corpus. The features analyzed include the length of the rubrics, their level of variation, the presence of author names, and vocabulary. Although no general patterns regarding length nor level of variation were detected, some important conclusions can be drawn: 1. there were no clear markers of literary genre in rubrics; 2. authorship was mostly absent, except for some specific cases of famous authors; 3. relatively stable keywords were used to identify particular texts, but they were more common in manuscripts with narrative texts (Erzählungen) and less common in later manuscripts dominated by the genre known as Minnereden. Furthermore, the analysis revealed that rubrics used a series of linguistic procedures to show that they participated in a different speech act than the main text – they embodied an interaction between scribes and readers, in which the former framed the reception of the work.

Semantic Study on Network News Texts in Mode of “Distant Reading”

The corpus adopted in this study is from the official news texts of Chinese and foreign network media collected and processed by researchers. By Voyant, a web-based text reading and analysis platform, the study finds and analyzes the semantic differences of lexical chunk Chinese culture in Chinese and foreign news stories under the semantic view of systematic-functional grammar with the digital humanistic mode “distant reading” as the semantic analysis research means. the study explores the implicit semantic deviation and its logical semantic relationship between Chinese and foreign news texts.

From Distant to Public Reading The (Hebrew) Novel in the Eyes of Many

From its very beginning, the term “distant reading” (Moretti 2000) was controversial, displacing ‘close reading’ by relying on literary histories and thereby reflecting on the entire global literary system. One of the weaknesses of this approach lies in its exclusive reliance on canonical and authoritative historiographies, one or two for each national literature, something which is bound to over-simplify the complexities of national literatures. As is known, Moretti’s proposal became a ‘slogan’ for Digital Humanities while algorithmic manipulation of texts has taken the place of reading literary (human) histories. Yet the problem of over-simplification remains, albeit differently. As an alternative, we offer a fusion approach, radicalising Moretti’s idea. In this article, we demonstrate how computer-based analysis of different readings carried out by many readers – not necessarily professionals – produces a relatively minute picture. Our case study will be the Hebrew novel, from its emergence in 1853 to the present day; a manageable corpus on which we gather information using questionnaires we have carefully created in our lab. Alongside the presentation of our approach, the actual research, and its initial findings, we will reflect theoretically on the conceptual benefits, as well as the limits, of public distance reading.

Intertextuelle Relationen in der Zeitungslandschaft des 18. Jahrhunderts: Close und Distant Reading von Ausgaben der Wiener und Preßburger Zeitung

In this article, two important newspapers of the Habsburg monarchy – the Wiener Zeitung (previously: Wien[n]erisches Diarium) and the Preßburger Zeitung – are related to each other in several aspects. After a historical overview of the context in which these periodicals were created and taking into account the research literature already available, the first step was to look for parallels in their formal design. Since both newspapers have also been digitally made accessible in full text recently, it was also possible to determine approximately how frequent direct mutual references to the other periodical occur by means of so-called distant reading procedures. Close reading methods were then used to examine and interpret the corpus-based references. This comparative approach with digital methods allows the synoptic examination of individual text passages and thus offers new insights into the complex relationship between the Wiener Zeitung and the Preßburger Zeitung in the 18th century.

Distant Reading of the Metadata of the Digitized Hungarian Charm Corpus

Based on Éva Pócs’ manual charm index an online database was created for Hungarian verbal charms within the East–West Research Group at the Institute of Ethnology, Hungarian Academy of Sciences (Budapest), between 2013 and 2018. The main goal was to create a multidimensional digital database. Digital text preparation would open the gates to new interpretations and analyses, which would bring us closer to understanding the compound and complex phenomena of charms. In the Digital Database of Hungarian Verbal Charms users can search by various metadata, like date and place of collection/recording, name of collector/scribe, informant, type of source, function of the charm, rites/gestures, language of the text, keywords etc. This paper focuses on how different new arrangements and distant reading of the corpora can reshape our knowledge about the Hungarian verbal charms.

Big data literario de raíz bibliotecaria: reflexiones sobre infraestructuras de anotación, catalogación, descubrimiento y recomendación de ficción narrativa

This work explores the relationships between the field of literary studies based on data inspired by the “distant reading” school and the digital humanities and the activity of libraries and other agents of the book sector in the ecosystem of recommendation and discovery of readings. Projects for enriching catalogues and description resources about literary fiction are presented, such as OCLC FictionFinder and Kirjasampo, within the framework of transmedia and open metadata, understood in relation to the practices of digital content consumption platforms such as Netflix or Amazon Prime Video. Besides, other practices of annotation and editing of literary texts are outlined. Finally, I explain opportunities to develop digital Library Laboratories supported by open data infrastructures such as Wikidata for the enriched description past and present of narrative fictions in a collaborative way, to enable projects and services for the discovery of related readings. Resumen Se describe la relación entre el campo de los estudios literarios basados en datos de la corriente distant reading y las humanidades digitales, y la actividad de las bibliotecas y otras entidades del sector del libro en el ecosistema de la recomendación y el descubrimiento de lecturas. Se presentan proyectos de catalogación y descripción enriquecida de la ficción literaria, como OCLC FictionFinder y Kirjasampo, en el marco de los metadatos transmedia y abiertos, entendidos en relación con las prácticas de plataformas de consumo de contenidos digitales como Netflix o Amazon Prime Video, junto a otras prácticas de anotación y edición de textos literarios. Finalmente se plantea la oportunidad de desarrollo de laboratorios bibliotecarios digitales apoyados en infraestructuras de datos abiertas como Wikidata para la descripción enriquecida de ficciones narrativas de todas las épocas de forma colaborativa, para posibilitar proyectos y servicios de descubrimiento de lecturas relacionadas.

Visualizing Networks of Cultural Discourses in Latin American Electronic Literature

There are relatively few studies that explore the interdisciplinarity between electronic literature and digital humanities research methods. The present paper addresses this lack by combining close reading and distant reading methodologies to analyze networks of cultural discourses in a corpus of 30 Latin American e-lit works published from 1995 to 2020. To conduct the research, three network graphs were created using Gephi, an open-source software for the exploration and analysis of network visualizations. The graphs study the following relations between the e-lit works and the cultural discourses: the frequency of primary, secondary and tertiary discourses, the degree of multi-discourse, and the degree of cultural discourse co-occurrence. The results show the appearance of unexpected discourse variations and new co-occurrence patterns, the benefits of network graphs for revealing e-lit works’ families, and the potential use of data visualization techniques to study e-lit databases. Overall, the paper demonstrates the utility of digital humanities research methods to further examine electronic literature materials.

Transformers analyzing poetry: multilingual metrical pattern prediction with transfomer-based language models

The splitting of words into stressed and unstressed syllables is the foundation for the scansion of poetry, a process that aims at determining the metrical pattern of a line of verse within a poem. Intricate language rules and their exceptions, as well as poetic licenses exerted by the authors, make calculating these patterns a nontrivial task. Some rhetorical devices shrink the metrical length, while others might extend it. This opens the door for interpretation and further complicates the creation of automated scansion algorithms useful for automatically analyzing corpora on a distant reading fashion. In this paper, we compare the automated metrical pattern identification systems available for Spanish, English, and German, against fine-tuned monolingual and multilingual language models trained on the same task. Despite being initially conceived as models suitable for semantic tasks, our results suggest that transformers-based models retain enough structural information to perform reasonably well for Spanish on a monolingual setting, and outperforms both for English and German when using a model trained on the three languages, showing evidence of the benefits of cross-lingual transfer between the languages.