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Toponyms as Entry Points into a Digital Edition: Mapping Die Fackel (1899-1936) AdrienBarbaresiadrien.barbaresi@oeaw.ac.atAustrianAcademyofSciences,Austria
Introduction Thesignificanceofplacenamesexceedstheusuallyadmitted frameofdeictic and indexical functions, astheyenfoldmorethanamerereferenceinspace.Inthewesterntradition,acurrentofreflexionwhichseemstodatebacktothe1960shasprovidedthetheoreticalfoundationsofthe“spatialturn”,whoseepitomeistheconcept of space as emergent rather than existing apriori, and composed of relations rather thanstructures (Warf, 2009). The emergence of currentnamed“GeoHumanities”(Dearetal.,2011)or“SpatialHumanities” (Bodenhammer et al., 2010), hasprompted fora transferof researchobjectsbetweendisciplines as well as an enforcement of the spatialturninpracticethroughspecificmethodsofanalysis.Thecommondenominatorconsistsinopeningupnewspaces and experimenting in a transdisciplinaryperspective (Domínguez, 2011) in a field which hasbeen evolving at an exponential pace since the lastdecade(CaquardandCartwright,2014). In this paper, I introduce a visualization ofcollocations of toponyms in the satirical literarymagazine Die Fackel (“The Torch”), originallypublishedandalmostentirelywrittenby the satiristandlanguagecriticKarlKrausinViennafrom1899to1936.Thisworkcarriesheterogeneityatitscoreandcontains a considerable variety of toponyms (Biber,2001) which are highly significant because of themultinationalnatureoftheAustro-Hungarianempireand the later formation of a territorially diminishedstate. Inordertoprovideanadditional,syntheticaccessto a digital edition of the work which is alreadyavailable online (AAC-Fackel corpus), I set out on adistantreadingexperimentleadingtomapsmeanttouncoverpatternsandspecificitieswhicharenoteasilyretraceable during close reading. I focus on the
conceptofvisualization,that isontheprocessesandnot on the products (Crampton, 2001), and presentthem together with a critical apparatus, by giving atheoretical perspective onwhat is being shown andseen.Infact,digitalmethodsinhumanitiesoughttobecriticized (Wulfman, 2014) and the cartographicenterprisebearsbothathrillandarisk:“addingmoretotheworldthroughabstraction”,and“addingtotheriskinessof cartographicpoliticsbyproliferatingyetmorerendersoftheworld”(Gerlach,2014).
Extraction of toponyms Theparticulartaskoffindingplacenamesintextsiscommonlynamedplacenamesextraction,toponymresolution, or geocoding. A first stage involves theidentification of potential geographic references,while a second stage resides in a disambiguationprocess (Leetaru, 2012). Toponym resolution oftenrelies on named-entity recognition and artificialintelligence(LeidnerandLieberman,2011).However,knowledge-basedmethods using fine-grained data –forexamplefromWikipedia–havealreadybeenusedwithencouragingresults(Huetal.,2014). The present endeavor grounds on a speciallycuratedgazetteer:duringthe20thcenturytherehavebeen significant political changes in Central Europethat have severely affected toponyms, so thatgeographical databases lack coverage and detail.Consequently,thedatabasedevelopedattheAustrianAcademy of Sciences (Academy Corpora) incooperationwiththeBerlin-BrandenburgAcademyofSciences (Language Center) focuses on Europe andfollowsfromacombinationofapproaches:gazetteersare curated in a semi-supervisedway to account forhistorical differences, and current geographicalinformationisusedasafallback.WikidataAPIandtheGeonames database are used to build the databasesemi-automatically. The tokenized files of works to be analyzed arefilteredandmatchedwiththedatabasebyfinite-stateautomatons (Barbaresi and Biber, 2016): toponyms(singleormulti-wordexpressions)areextractedusingaslidingwindow.Acascadeoffiltersisused:currentand historical states; regions, important subparts ofstates,andregionallandscapes;populatedplaces;andgeographicalfeatures.Disambiguationbeingacriticalcomponent (Leetaru, 2012), an algorithm similar toPouliquen et al. (2006), who demonstrated that anacceptableprecisioncanbereachedthatway,guessesthemostprobableentrybasedondistancetoVienna(Sinnott, 1984), contextual information (closest-country,lastnamesresolved),andimportance(place
type,populationcount).TheresultsareprojectedonamapofEuropeusingTileMill.
From collocations to lines of thought Inafurtheranalysis, Ivisualizeco-occurrencesofextractedtoponyms,whichcanbeconsideredtobeasubset of GeoCollocations (Bubenhofer, 2014), inorder to draw sequences, airborne lines followingtheirorderofappearance.Theword“network”istobeusedwithcircumspectionasLatour(1999)suggests.Although it is ubiquitous in the terminology of thespatial turn, the now predominant interpretation inthe sense of the World Wide Web suggests animmediacywhichiscontrarytotheacceptionsithadbefore, so that the concept of “meshwork” is moreappropriate(Ingold,2007).IthusinterpretFigure1asa general meshwork which makes it possible tovisualize paths depicting chains of thought(Gedankengänge) as well as their intensity (well-troddenorseldom).Iftheymayrevealspatialpatternsthat would otherwise remain hidden in texts(Bodenhammer et al., 2010), these linkages are also“mappings and tracing imposed on the data”(Wulfman, 2014) which are not meant to beinterpretedwithoutfurtherfiltering.
Figure 1.Unfiltered map of toponymic co-occurrences
A rhizome as entry to Die Fackel ThatiswhyIrefinethemapbyselectingasubsetofthe co-occurrences – themaximal distance betweentwoextractedplacenamesisfixedtotwentytokens–andbycolor-codingqualitativefeatures–thetypologyofplacenamesandtheaxisoftime.Themostfrequentplace names are printed out. Surfaces (regions forinstance) cannot be represented as such because ofhistoricalevolutionsandbecauseofthedifficultiesof
linking surfaces without tampering with mapreadability. Coastlines are depicted in gray to give asenseoforientation,noboundariesaredrawn,astheyare of a changing nature and may superimpose anartificialreadingofthemap(Smith2005).
Figure 2. Refined analysis (size proportional to corpus fre-
quency; yellow: sovereign territories; orange: regions; green: populated places; blue: geographical features; time axis rep-
resented by a gradient from light green to dark blue)
The notion of rhizome has been used in corpuslinguistics by Scharloth et al. (2013) to qualifydiscourses captured by collocation graphs, it hasoriginallybeencoinedbyDeleuzeandGuattari(1987[1980]). This concept is particularly adequate forKraus, as the Austrian satirist has always beenconcerned by the multiple aspects of discourse andreality. In addition, his work in Die Fackel evadesdistant reading processes because of the number ofcitationsusedanditseverpresentandextensiveusageofparody.Itwouldbevaintodesignanauthoritativecartography of Die Fackel: following from theprinciplesofheterogeneityand“asignifyingrupture”(ibid.), the lines are frequently interrupted.Phenomena in the low-frequency range are filteredoutbythehumaneye,butclustersandinterpretationcuesmayemergewhichprovideadifferentaccesstothework. In this regard,Figure2depictsarhizomeconnectingheterogeneousinformation,justasweareall “traversed by lines, geodesics, tropics, and zonesmarching to different beats and differing in nature”(ibid.).
Conclusion I have presented a distant reading experimentwhichconsistsofconnectingtoponymsextractedand
projectedonmaps.Thelatteraremeanttobereleasedasanadditionalfeaturetotheexistingdigitaledition.The Software and gazetteer will be made availableunder open-source licenses, for development files(please refer to the Github repository). The firstexampledisplaysunfilteredlinesofthought,whereasthesecondonegroundsonarefinedanalysisandletsthe practical image of a rhizome emerge.While DieFackel criticizes mechanical, instrumental language(Hirt, 2002), the “well-informed” linguisticinstrumentscanhelpmaterializingdotsorsequences,but not without “human” intervention. The filteringstepsontheprojectionechothehermeneuticcircleofthe philological tradition; they also make computedinformation visible and apprehensible which couldremain“blind”otherwise(Barbaresi,2012). This is not an authoritative cartography of DieFackel but rather an indirect depiction of theviewpointofKrausandhiscontemporaries.DrawingonKraus’vitriolicrecordingofpoliticallife,toponymsin Die Fackel tell a story about the ongoingreconfiguration of Europe. As the map conveys theuncanny sensation that the continent is a field onwhichpointseastandwestareprojected,thelinesofforceentangleEuropeancountriesandcapitals.Theirspatial patterns document an inclination for majorculturalcenters,whereasthechronologicaldimensioncapturesamajorshifttowardstheendofpublication:the force field intensifies as its range narrows,showingboththeinterplayofmajorEuropeanpowersof the time and the emergence of transatlantic(westwards) and transeuropean (eastwards)relationships. This evolution can be read as anintensificationoftensionsandaprefigurationofotherschemes,thistimeofmilitarynature.
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