Romantic Cartographies

Lived and Imagined Space in English and German Romantic Texts, 1790–1840

Postdoctoral Project 2017–2022
Turku Institute for Advanced Studies & Academy of Finland
Dr. Asko Nivala
University of Turku

Romantic Cartographies (ROMCAR) is a digital humanities project that studies the construction of space during the Romantic era (1790s–1840s).

Most texts are spatial implying a network of places. This was especially typical of the Romantic era (1790s–1840s) that was characterised by the growing interest in historical and natural sites. The ROMCAR project analyses the spatiality of Romantic texts by reconstructing the various maps they implied.

The geoparsing methods developed during the project will enable extracting locational data from textual corpora. ROMCAR applies named-entity linking (NEL) to extract toponyms from Romantic fiction and travelogues published in English and German. In addition to named-entity recognition (NER), NEL disambiguates the found entities by linking them with DBpedia. The results of text mining are visualised as superimposed maps, which produce new knowledge about the relationship of centre and periphery, or urban and natural areas in Romanticism.

Corpora

The project is based on two corpora:

How to Cite

Asko Nivala: The Construction of Space in English and German Literature 1790–1848: Geoparsing the Corvey Collection, Literary Geographies Vol. 9, No. 2 2023, pp. 352–376, OPEN ACCESS.

Principal Investigator

Dr Asko Nivala
Adjunct Professor (Docent) of Cultural History
University of Turku

Funding

2017-2019: Turku Institute for Advanced Studies (TIAS)
2019-2022: Academy of Finland