The First of May in German Literature
Introduction by OpenMethods Editor (Erzsébet Tóth-Czifra): Research on date extractions from literature brings us closer to answering big questions of “when literature takes place”. As Frank Fischer’s blog post, First of May in German literature shows, beyond mere quantification, this line of research also yields insights on the cultural significance of certain dates. In this case, the significance of 1st of May in German literature (as reflected in the “Corpus of German-Language Fiction” dataset) was determined with the help of the open access tool HeidelTime. The brief description of the workflow is a smart demonstration of the potential of open DH methods and data sharing in sustainable ways.
Bonus one: the post starts out from briefly touching upon some of Frank’s public humanities activities.
Bonus two: mention of the Tiwoli (“Today in World Literature”) app, a fun side product built on top of the date extraction research.
[ tl;dr: This blogpost introduces a small dataset comprising 249 mentions
of the “1st of May” extracted from a corpus of German-language fiction. ]… Although we cannot say anything about recall in our exploratory study, the precision of HeidelTime is really good. We knew that before, of course, but never really detailed this. So this blogpost confirms the special role that May plays in German prose literature, even if the means we used at the time are far from being able to provide an exhaustive answer to the questions of “when literature takes place”. But it was a start.
Source: The First of May in German Literature
Original date of publication: 04.05.2021
InternetArchive link: https://web.archive.org/web/20210513171253/https://weltliteratur.net/the-first-of-may-in-german-literature/