After years of hard work by a multilanguage team of researchers, the database of European local literature and culture that led to the Redefining the Region project is finally complete. The database contains information on thousands of texts and images from literary publications, illustrated works and reviews. It also offers interactive features like timelines, maps and network models. Researchers can use these to map how literary works travelled across Europe and how reviews connected authors. “Traditional methods could never have made these patterns visible,” Corporaal stresses. “Now, you can see when the production of regional literature was at its highest for each country, allowing us to also discover larger, Europe-wide patterns. There were clusters of countries in which translations of regional novels and story collections circulated more often, such as the Netherlands, Ireland, Germany and Sweden.
Digital Humanities allows literary scholars to ask new questions
Thanks to an innovative Digital Humanities project, literary scholar Marguérite Corporaal was able to gain surprising insights into regional literature in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. “Using the database we developed, we encountered new questions. For example: what role did female writers play in this genre? The data showed that they had a bigger influence than was previously assumed, and that their work circulated internationally and was even compared to bigger, canonical authors.”
One of the most striking results came from a separate visualisation of American historical reviews, which shows how often links were drawn between authors. “The author that was mentioned the most in the reviews is a female writer: Jane Barlow. Today, not a lot of people are aware of her work, but in our visualisation she represented a very large dot.”
Jane Barlow was an Irish writer whose works were concerned with the Irish peasantry during the Irish Literary Revival, a period where modernisation and migration drastically changed the Irish countryside. In the reviews, the works of prominent authors like Nathaniel Hawthorne were compared to hers. “It makes you think: isn’t it wonderful that this isn’t a male writer, but a woman? And it’s not even the case that the reviews associate her as a female writer with the work of other women, as was common for “feminine genres”. Instead, she is also compared to male writers like George Moore. That really flipped our whole perception of this time on its head.”
A new way of thinking
Corporaal closely collaborated with the Humanities Lab, where experts on data analysis and visualisation helped to turn abstract concepts, like literary influence, into concrete data. The collaboration made it possible to come to new questions that would otherwise not have been posed, and formulate answers that would otherwise have been difficult to see. “They helped us understand how the system worked, which is not necessarily something that comes naturally to academics. They also asked critical questions: what questions do you have for the data, and can they be answered? How do you design a relational database with interconnected data fields that is able to answer all of these questions? It was a very valuable experience.”
Corporaal is very enthusiastic about what digitisation can mean for the future of the humanities. “Digital Humanities helps us to see larger patterns which are otherwise very much invisible. I’m already playing around with ideas to develop similar databases for research into translators and activism in that same period.”
Platform for Digital Humanities
Digitisation does not only offer the humanities new methods, but it also opens up questions that were previously left unanswered. Want to know more about these methods? The Platform for Digital Humanities is accessible to all RICH researchers who want to engage with Digital Humanities, in big ways or small ways. Feel free to make an appointment with Roel Smeets to see what is possible for you.
Contact information
- Organizational unit
- Radboud Institute for Culture and History, Faculty of Arts, RICH Platform for Digital Humanities
- About person
- Prof. M.C.M. Corporaal (Marguérite) , Dr R.J.H. Smeets (Roel)
- Theme
- Art & Culture