Dr. Frank Fischer in School of Linguistics: "A Digital Take on World Literature - How we can enhance Literary Studies with the help of Computational Linguistics"

 Dr. Frank Fischer (Göttingen Centre for Digital Humanities): "A Digital Take on World  Literature - How we can enhance Literary Studies with the help of Computational  Linguistics"
 If it comes to the vast and diverse corpus of world literature, the lone scholar is soon  confronted with the limits of traditional research. It is no secret anymore that by help of  advanced digital methods we can process a much larger amount of literary texts than  usual (an amount that is rather measured in gigabytes than in pages). In doing so, we  can analyse aspects of literary history that couldn't be investigated before. In this 45-  minute lecture I will introduce three innovative takes on world literature, all recently  developed in cooperation with fellow colleagues. The first one revolves around the use of  network analysis for large corpora of dramatic texts; it will show how we can find patterns  of modernisation with the help of network theory. The second one focuses on the  extraction of temporal expressions from large corpora of novels in order to build a "calendar of world literature". The third one will deal with the representation of world literature in the 15 major Wikipedia versions, based on its semanticised version, DBpedia. None of these projects are limited to a specific language or a specific national literature. As diverse as they may look at first glance, they all aim at reiterating our concepts of world literature in a digital fashion by help of a number of methods of computational linguistics and network theory.

Lecture starts on 9th April at 14.00