Project outline

Human experience is spatial and space is therefore always more or less obviously encoded in language. [1, p. 292] In narrative literature, narrated space emerges from this circumstance: the production of space through its narrative structuring and functionalization. For the novel in particular, this aspect has been studied in historical case studies [2, 3, 4, 5, 6] as well as in literary studies with a systematizing claim. [7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 5] In order to broaden the horizon of these investigations with computational methods in the sense of Distant Reading, it is necessary to map conceptual categories for the analysis of narrative space to features on the surface of the text. The CANSpiN project follows on from work that has already addressed this problem [12, 13, 14].

In three workpackages, we firstly pursue the goal of recognizing and analyzing the literary phenomenon of narrative space - on the one hand related to spatial referential expressions on the surface of the text and on the other hand restricted to that part of the diegesis in which the characters move - with computer-aided methods (AP 1: Recognition - Digital Humanities). Second, for this purpose we explore the possibilities and limitations of deep learning with language models of the BERT architecture and Generative AI (WP 2: Explainable AI - Mathematics). And third, we expect to be able to contribute to questions of literary history with the analysis results (WP 3: Application - Literary Studies).

The project is explorative, bilingual and interdisciplinary: The corpora are annotated with different category sets to be developed in WP1. This stepwise process provides BERT models and data for Explainable AI research in AP2 on the one hand, and AP2 supports the annotation processes in AP1 based on the findings in AP2 on the other hand. Finally, the literary relevance of the data generated in AP1 is evaluated in AP3.

1. Doris Bachmann-Medick: Cultural Turns. Neuorientierung in den Kulturwissenschaften. Reinbek, 2006.
2. Nancy Hanway: Embodying Argentina. Body, Space and Nation in 19th Century Narrative. Jefferson, NC, 2003.
3. Nicola Westphal: Literarische Kartografie. Erzählter Raum in den Romanen Uwe Johnsons. Göttingen, 2007.
4. Bernhard Viel: Utopie der Nation. Ursprünge des Nationalismus im Roman der Gründerzeit. Berlin, 2009.
5. Jörg Dünne und Andreas Mahler (Hg.): Handbuch Literatur & Raum. Berlin, 2015.
6. José Eduardo González und Timothy R. Robbins (Hg.): Urban Spaces in Contemporary Latin American Literature. Cham, 2019.
7. Jurij Michailowitsch Lotman: Die Struktur literarischer Texte. München, 4. Ausg., 1993.
8. Ruth Ronen: Space in Fiction. In: Poetics Today, 7.3:421–438, 1986.
9. Barbara Piatti: Die Geographie der Literatur. Schauplätze, Handlungsräume, Raumphantasien. Göttingen, 2008.
10. Katrin Dennerlein: Narratologie des Raumes. Berlin und New York, 2009.
11. Marie-Laure Ryan: Space. In: Peter Hühn, Jan Christoph Meister, John Pier und Wolf Schmid (Hg.): The living handbook of narratology. Hamburg, April 2014.
12. Gabriel Viehhauser: Zur Erkennung von Raum in narrativen Texten. Spatial frames und Raumsemantik als Modelle für eine digitale Narratologie des Raums. In: Reflektierte algorithmische Textanalyse, 373–388. 2020.
13. Florian Barth: Konzept und Klassifikation literarischer Raumentitäten. In: Ralf Heinrich Reussner, Anne Koziolek und Robert Heinrich (Hg.): INFORMATIK 2020, 1281–1293, Bonn, 2021.
14. Mareike Schumacher: Orte und Räume im Roman. Ein Beitrag zur digitalen Literaturwissenschaft. Digitale Literaturwissenschaft. Springer Link, 2023.

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