A Mixed Methods Design for Computational Genre Stylistics and Unstructured Genres. Towards a Functional History of 19th Century German Novellas.
Final Report Abstract
There are two contradictory views on the Novelle, which is regarded as one of the leading genres of German literature of the 19th century. One group claims that the Novelle is a strict form and to be distinguished from a more unspecific concept of the Erzählung. The other side is convinced that both groups do not form any distinguishable genres at all. However, both groups have missed the specific dialectics of the concept: the Novelle is a genre with strong poetological expectations but has a loose writing practice. The project aimed to clarify and understand the contradiction in research and the structural dialectics of the concept of the Novelle. Since 19th-century prose fiction is a mass media phenomenon, the project develops its methods within the framework of corpusbased computational literary studies (CLS). The first task is to provide a model that takes into account the heterogeneity and loose structure of literary genres. So far, such a model has not been available either for computational or philological genre stylistics. The main achievements and findings of the project are (1) the development of a model of the social complexity of literaryhistorical change and the statistical identification of the media factors that explain literary change; the operationalization of complex textual features such as (2) Romance setting and (3) suspense, some of which are postulated in the novella poetics, and the empirical evidence of their relevance in the historical configuration of genre semantics; (4) the formalization of distance-based text group analysis; (5) an innovative model of semantic change that maps the vagueness and openness of the conceptual and prototypical semantic structure of genre concepts; (6) evidence that some uses of genre concepts can be better explained in terms of social interaction than in terms of textual features. All six insights are methodologically and empirically independent research contributions that empower future research to address historical and context-sensitive tasks. The dialectic structure of the concept of the Novelle is thus corroborated in a hypothesis-driven research design on the empirical basis of a new corpus and traced with greater depth of focus. In their interplay, the individual results show that the German novella genres of Novelle and Erzählung exist only in a weak sense as text types and in a different sense than it was postulated by historical poetics.
Publications
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»Modeling Prototypicality for Genre Concepts« (Poster Presentation: iSchool Showcase, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign).
Schröter, Julian
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»Representing and Modeling Cultural Relevance in Corpora for Historical Analysis.« In: The Book of Abstracts of DH 2022, 686–87. Tokyo
Schröter, Julian
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»Validating Topic Modeling as a Method of Analyzing Sujet and Theme.« In: Journal of Computational Literary Studies 1: o.S.
Schröter, Julian & Keli Du
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Ein digitales Korpus der Novellen und Journalprosa des 19. Jahrhunderts. University Goettingen.
Julian, Schröter; Johannes, Leitgeb & Theresa, Valta
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PyNovellaHistory: Python Code for the Project on the History of the German 19th- Century Novella.«.
Schröter, Julian
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»Heftromane: Python Code for a Study on Suspense in German Dime Novels (Dt. Heftromane).«
Schröter, Julian
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»Mixed Methods.« In: Begriffe der Digital Humanities. Ein diskursives Glossar, hg. v. AG Digital Humanities Theorie des Verbandes Digital Humanities im deutschsprachigen Raum e. V. Wolfenbüttel (Zeitschrift für digitale Geisteswissenschaften / Working Papers, 2), o.S.
Schröter, Julian
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»›Spannung Ist Männersache‹? Zur Quantitativen Analyse von Suspense in Heftromanen.« In: Heftromane. KODEX. Jahrbuch Der Internationalen Buchwissenschaftlichen Gesellschaft, 282–299.
Schröter, Julian
