GCDH
The sub-project in literary criticism analyses the way of citing in the history of German literature between 1500 and 1900. The project is based on one of the largest digital corpus of German literature, the zeno.org-corpus, which is freely available under “TextGrid” (www.textgrid.de). It contains 1.8 million word token, i.e. more than 130 million words. His objective is, to extract structured knowledge out of low structured texts, to understand better, how citing was practiced in the history of German literature.
The citing practice of the Bible could exemplary be named. Is there a diminishing pattern of quotation from the Bible, as one could assume out of theories of secularization? Or is there only a shifting in the books out of which the literature is quoting? Another example is the thesis of the aesthetic of autonomy. Is literature citing more from itself the more literature becomes modern? Is literature becoming more and more self-referencing, as the thesis of the aesthetic of autonomy predicates? The sub-project takes such and similar thesis as a starting point, because we already have somewhat secure knowledge to compare the computer based results with. The comparison of the results should validate, to what extent computer based methods are reliable for questions of literary studies.
In the medium term the sub-project will develop reliable text mining tools for literary scholarship. They will be capable to do text mining on very large corpora of texts. These tools and methods of text mining could widen the established methods in literary study. They will extend historical and hermeneutical methods by quantitative, statistical and formalistic ones. The paradigmatic expansion of the methodology in literary study is the disciplinary goal of the project. We expected that formal-algorithmic methods are qualified, to pose old research questions more precisely and new questions for the first time.
