Computational Approaches to Narrative Space in 19th and 20th Century Novels

19 世纪和 20 世纪小说叙事空间的计算方法

• 批准号: 508056813
• 负责人: Professor Dr. Holger Helbig
• 金额: --
• 依托单位: Institut für Mathematik
• 依托单位国家: 德国
• 项目类别: Priority Programmes
• 资助国家: 德国
• 项目状态: 未结题
• 来源: https://gepris.dfg.de/gepris/projekt/508056813?language=en
• 关键词: Computational; Approaches; Narrative; Space; 19th

Literary theory provides elaborate instruments for the conceptualization and description of narrative space, understood here as the concrete space of the narrated world, in which characters live, act, and move. However, to be able to use the existing concepts in computational analyses, they need to be formalized and mapped to features that can be captured on the linguistic surface of the texts. For distant reading approaches, in particular, it is necessary to design algorithms that allow to annotate the features automatically. In this area, so far, only basic preliminary work has been done for the computational, quantitative analysis of narrative space.In order to provide a solid basis for further computational research, we aim to develop methods for the recognition of spatial entities, i.e. all kinds of references to narrative space in the literary texts, such as toponyms, general space-related nouns or deictic expressions. For this task, we use existing semantic word nets and machine learning techniques, in particular neural large-scale language models, which are able to consider the linguistic context of the relevant spatial references. On top of the basic recognition of the spatial entities, methods are developed to classify them further into higher level categories such as mentions of space that are directly relevant to the plot vs. descriptions of the setting vs. further references to spatial entities. A third aim of the project is to approach the semantic structure of narrative worlds and the symbolic meaning of subspaces by connecting occurrences of spatial references in the texts with topics and sentiments.The research is based on empirical work, using corpora of novels in Spanish and German from the 19th and 20th century, which were chosen to develop multilingual and/or language-independent solutions. Gold standard reference data are created by manually annotating parts of the corpora, which are then used for the evaluation of the methods. From a literary historical perspective, we examine how the representation of space in the novels connects to questions of national, regional and other kinds of identity related to space, following the concept of “imagined communities” (Anderson). This is done, inter alia, by linking the analysis of spatial references in the texts to author nationalities, publication places of the novels, and topics of the texts. With the corpus-based studies, existing literary historical questions such as the role of novels in the process of nation-building in the 19th century and their function in the formation of two German identities in 20th century post-war literature are addressed, with a new set of computational methods and on a broader empirical basis than before, in order to substantiate and extend previous research results.

文学理论为叙事空间的概念化和描述提供了详尽的工具，在这里，叙事空间被理解为被叙述世界的具体空间，人物在其中生活、行动和移动。然而，为了能够在计算分析中使用现有的概念，需要将它们形式化并映射到可以在文本的语言表面上捕获的特征上。特别是对于远程阅读方法，有必要设计允许自动注释特征的算法。在这方面，到目前为止，对叙事空间的计算性、定量分析只做了基本的初步工作。为了为进一步的计算研究提供坚实的基础，我们的目标是开发空间实体的识别方法，即文学文本中对叙事空间的各种引用，如地名、一般空间相关名词或指示表达。对于这项任务，我们使用现有的语义词网络和机器学习技术，特别是神经大规模语言模型，它能够考虑相关空间参考的语言上下文。在对空间实体的基本识别之上，开发了将它们进一步分类为更高级别类别的方法，例如与情节直接相关的空间提及vs.对背景的描述vs.对空间实体的进一步引用。该项目的第三个目标是通过将文本中空间引用的出现与主题和情感联系起来，研究叙事世界的语义结构和子空间的符号意义。该研究基于实证工作，使用了19世纪和20世纪西班牙语和德语的小说语料库，这些语料库被选择用于开发多语言和/或语言独立的解决方案。金标准参考数据是通过手动标注语料库的部分来创建的，然后用于评估方法。从文学史的角度，我们遵循“想象共同体”的概念，研究小说中空间的表现如何与国家、地区和其他与空间相关的身份问题联系起来。除其他外，这是通过将文本中的空间参考分析与作者国籍、小说出版地点和文本主题联系起来实现的。通过基于语料库的研究，以一套新的计算方法和更广泛的实证基础，探讨19世纪小说在国家建设过程中的作用及其在20世纪战后文学中两种德国身份形成中的作用等现存文学史问题，以充实和扩展以往的研究成果。