Traditionally, humanities scholars carrying out research on a specific or on multiple literary work(s) are interested in the analysis of related texts or text passages. But the digital age has opened possibilities for scholars to enhance their traditional workflows. Enabled by digitization projects, humanities scholars can nowadays reach a large number of digitized texts through web portals such as Google Books or Internet Archive. Digital editions exist also for ancient texts; notable examples are PHI Latin Texts and the Perseus Digital Library. This shift from reading a single book “on paper” to the possibility of browsing many digital texts is one of the origins and principal pillars of the digital humanities domain, which helps developing solutions to handle vast amounts of cultural heritage data – text being the main data type. In contrast to the traditional methods, the digital humanities allow to pose new research questions on cultural heritage datasets. Some of these questions can be answered with existent algorithms and tools provided by the computer science domain, but for other humanities questions scholars need to formulate new methods in collaboration with computer scientists. Developed in the late 1980s, the digital humanities primarily focused on designing standards to represent cultural heritage data such as the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) for texts, and to aggregate, digitize and deliver data. In the last years, visualization techniques have gained more and more importance when it comes to analyzing data. For example, Saito introduced her 2010 digital humanities conference paper with: “In recent years, people have tended to be overwhelmed by a vast amount of information in various contexts. Therefore, arguments about ’Information Visualization’ as a method to make information easy to comprehend are more than understandable.” A major impulse for this trend was given by Franco Moretti. In 2005, he published the book “Graphs, Maps, Trees”, in which he proposes so-called distant reading approaches for textual data that steer the traditional way of approaching literature towards a completely new direction. Instead of reading texts in the traditional way – so-called close reading –, he invites to count, to graph and to map them. In other words, to visualize them. This dissertation presents novel close and distant reading visualization techniques for hitherto unsolved problems. Appropriate visualization techniques have been applied to support basic tasks, e.g., visualizing geospatial metadata to analyze the geographical distribution of cultural heritage data items or using tag clouds to illustrate textual statistics of a historical corpus. In contrast, this dissertation focuses on developing information visualization and visual analytics methods that support investigating research questions that require the comparative analysis of various digital humanities datasets. We first take a look at the state-of-the-art of existing close and distant reading visualizations that have been developed to support humanities scholars working with literary texts. We thereby provide a taxonomy of visualization methods applied to show various aspects of the underlying digital humanities data. We point out open challenges and we present our visualizations designed to support humanities scholars in comparatively analyzing historical datasets. In short, we present (1) GeoTemCo for the comparative visualization of geospatial-temporal data, (2) the two tag cloud designs TagPies and TagSpheres that comparatively visualize faceted textual summaries, (3) TextReuseGrid and TextReuseBrowser to explore re-used text passages among the texts of a corpus, (4) TRAViz for the visualization of textual variation between multiple text editions, and (5) the visual analytics system MusikerProfiling to detect similar musicians to a given musician of interest. Finally, we summarize our and the collaboration experiences of other visualization researchers to emphasize the ingredients required for a successful project in the digital humanities, and we take a look at future challenges in that research field.

Traditionally, humanities scholars carrying out research on a specific or on multiple literary work(s) are interested in the analysis of related texts or text passages. But the digital age has opened possibilities for scholars to enhance their traditional workflows. Enabled by digitization projects, humanities scholars can nowadays reach a large number of digitized texts through web portals such as Google Books or Internet Archive. Digital editions exist also for ancient texts; notable examples are PHI Latin Texts and the Perseus Digital Library. This shift from reading a single book “on paper” to the possibility of browsing many digital texts is one of the origins and principal pillars of the digital humanities domain, which helps developing solutions to handle vast amounts of cultural heritage data – text being the main data type. In contrast to the traditional methods, the digital humanities allow to pose new research questions on cultural heritage datasets. Some of these questions can be answered with existent algorithms and tools provided by the computer science domain, but for other humanities questions scholars need to formulate new methods in collaboration with computer scientists. Developed in the late 1980s, the digital humanities primarily focused on designing standards to represent cultural heritage data such as the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) for texts, and to aggregate, digitize and deliver data. In the last years, visualization techniques have gained more and more importance when it comes to analyzing data. For example, Saito introduced her 2010 digital humanities conference paper with: “In recent years, people have tended to be overwhelmed by a vast amount of information in various contexts. Therefore, arguments about ’Information Visualization’ as a method to make information easy to comprehend are more than understandable.” A major impulse for this trend was given by Franco Moretti. In 2005, he published the book “Graphs, Maps, Trees”, in which he proposes so-called distant reading approaches for textual data that steer the traditional way of approaching literature towards a completely new direction. Instead of reading texts in the traditional way – so-called close reading –, he invites to count, to graph and to map them. In other words, to visualize them. This dissertation presents novel close and distant reading visualization techniques for hitherto unsolved problems. Appropriate visualization techniques have been applied to support basic tasks, e.g., visualizing geospatial metadata to analyze the geographical distribution of cultural heritage data items or using tag clouds to illustrate textual statistics of a historical corpus. In contrast, this dissertation focuses on developing information visualization and visual analytics methods that support investigating research questions that require the comparative analysis of various digital humanities datasets. We first take a look at the state-of-the-art of existing close and distant reading visualizations that have been developed to support humanities scholars working with literary texts. We thereby provide a taxonomy of visualization methods applied to show various aspects of the underlying digital humanities data. We point out open challenges and we present our visualizations designed to support humanities scholars in comparatively analyzing historical datasets. In short, we present (1) GeoTemCo for the comparative visualization of geospatial-temporal data, (2) the two tag cloud designs TagPies and TagSpheres that comparatively visualize faceted textual summaries, (3) TextReuseGrid and TextReuseBrowser to explore re-used text passages among the texts of a corpus, (4) TRAViz for the visualization of textual variation between multiple text editions, and (5) the visual analytics system MusikerProfiling to detect similar musicians to a given musician of interest. Finally, we summarize our and the collaboration experiences of other visualization researchers to emphasize the ingredients required for a successful project in the digital humanities, and we take a look at future challenges in that research field.

I denna uppsats undersöks hur begreppet ”vi och dem” manifesteras i tre romaner med utgångspunkt i en samhällskontext. I studien används Franco Morettis (Elektronisk källa: 8.10.2012) analysmetod, ”distant reading”, vilket innebär att man bortser från detaljer och istället fokuserar på helheten. Syftet har således varit att belysa begreppet ”vi och dem” i romanerna Om jag kunde drömma (Meyer, 2005), Hungerspelen (Collins, 2008) samt Ett öga rött (Khemiri, 2003). I samspel med metoden ”distant reading” har även Illman och Nynäs (2005) tanke om att texter alltid läses och tolkas utifrån individers tidigare erfarenheter samt den omgivande kontexten varit till hjälp. Illman och Nynäs (2005) beskriver begreppen ”grupperingar”, ”fördom” och ”gränsöverskridande möten” som används i analyskapitlet. Dessa begrepp belyses sedan ur ett samhällsperspektiv med utgångspunkt i begreppet ”vi och dem” där en diskussion förs kopplat till tidigare forskning, romananalyserna och egna reflektioner. Resultatet åskådliggör att delar ur dessa romaner kan gestalta olika förhållanden där förutfattade meningar samt grupperingar av olika slag kan leda till fördom och hur dessa kan motverkas genom gränsöverskridande möten.

This project examines the corpus of novels that have been nominated for the Man Booker Prize and, using the prize as a creator of a contemporary literary canon, attempts to develop a model of a contemporary best text. Using the distant reading techniques proposed by digital humanities scholar Franco Moretti to track and graph a variety of formal and structural variables across the corpus of nominees, it becomes apparent that the kind of novel that typically wins the Booker Prize and thus the kind of novel that qualifies as a contemporary best text fits a distinct mold. These novels are solemn, serious texts written by British or Irish men, and the stories they tell concern young British or Irish men struggling, often alone, in pain, and under the threat of impending age, through a brutal, violent, and amoral world.

This thesis aims to understand the emotions expressed by adults watching animated films with death topics through sentiment analysis. The research is a quantitative sentiment analysis from the perspective of distant reading. The previous studies on death scenes in animated films have only focused on child audiences. However, the age group of the audience of animated films is extensive; thus, it is necessary to analyse the sentiments of adult audiences. This thesis attempts to collect two movies produced by Pixar studio: Coco (2017) and Soul (2020), as well as their audience reviews on IMDb, a total of 600, for cross-comparison. Additionally, it analyses the content containing death in the reviews to understand better adult audiences’ emotional expressions on the subject of death. The analysing results show that the positive sentiment scores of the comments containing death are slightly lower than the scores of all the reviews, and the scores of the negative sentiments do not differ much. However, positive emotions still dominate these comments that contain death. The emotional performance between the script and the reviews is roughly similar. Still, the emotional intensity of the comments is higher than that of the script, indicating that the audience is willing to show their emotions on the public online film platform. Future research is recommended to conduct analysis together with other NLP analysis methods or close reading to explore more details of the content.

This study examines The Guardian’s portrayal of intersectional feminism, with a focus on gender and race, analysing how social movements, particularly Black Lives Matter, influence its political coverage. Arising from Kimberlé Crenshaw’s concept of intersectionality, which recognizes the interconnected nature of various forms of oppression and privilege, the research employs a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods to analyse 647 political articles. Quantitative methods, including topic modeling and keyword frequency analysis, provide the structural framework of the thesis. Topic modeling reveals twenty topics, and keyword frequency analysis emphasizes in nine keywords related to intersectional feminism and their prevalence. Qualitative methods, such as collocation analysis and close reading, examine particularly “gender” and “race”. Close reading is used for a deeper examination at every step of the analysis. Despite theme variations, certain subjects like the gender gap and gender identity consistently underscore their enduring significance. Discussions related to Black Lives Matter show spikes in coverage post – 2020, indicating an increased emphasis on diversity and racial justice themes. However, the infrequent use of the term “intersectionality” suggests a potential disparity between the conceptual framework and its direct representation in The Guardian’s political articles.

Die Promotionsarbeit untersucht ca. 600 Stücke aus der Zeit von den ersten Vorläufern des Sturm und Drang bis zur Märzrevolution auf die Darstellung und die dramaturgische Funktion des Todes. Nachdem sie zunächst klärt, auf welche Weise der Tod dem Publikum bzw. dem Leser vermittelt wird, folgt eine Untersuchung im Hinblick auf vier verschiedene Aspekte: Struktur, Sprechakte, Szenenbilder und Figuren. Dabei werden unter anderem der Einfluss der Position des Todes im Stück auf dessen Darstellung geklärt, die typischen Merkmale des Sterbemonologs erläutert, das Arrangieren von Leichen im Szenenbild beschrieben und das Verhältnis des Todes von Haupt- und Nebenfiguren untersucht. In einem abschließenden Teil werden die einzelnen Ergebnisse zu einer Dramaturgie des Sterbens verknüpft und deren Leitlinien herausgearbeitet. / The dissertation examines about 600 plays from the time of the first precursors of the Sturm und Drang up to the March Revolution on the depiction and dramaturgical function of death. After first clarifying the way in which death is conveyed to the public or the reader, an investigation follows with regard to four different aspects: structure, speech acts, scene images and characters. Among other things, it clarifies the influence of the position of death in the play on its representation, explains the typical features of the death monologue, describes the arrangement of corpses in the scene and examines the relationship between the death of main and minor characters. In a concluding part, the individual results are linked to a dramaturgy of dying and its guidelines are explained.

In the field of public diplomacy, it has increasingly become relevant to develop analytical operations in order to gain knowledge on the perceptions of foreign publics and their attitudes towards countries – a construct known as the country image. In recent time, research on public diplomacy has been increasingly occupied with the impact of media on country images due to the continuous expansion and fragmentation of the hybrid media landscape. Academics and practitioners alike must navigate through large quantities of data and different choices regarding prioritization of sources and methods in order to find suitable analytical frameworks to properly investigate the country image as an analytical object. This thesis addresses these analytical challenges by developing a diachronic text mining analysis of the Swedish country image in the British newspaper the Guardian. Sweden has in recent years drawn attention from the international media, for example during the so-called refugee crisis of 2015 and during the covid-19 pandemic of 2020. In the extensive media coverage of these major events the Swedish course of action was met with a wide range approval and criticism. Using a mixed-method approach of distant and close reading, this thesis approaches the news coverage of Sweden in the Guardian through a content analysis designed in three analytical steps: topic modelling, collocation and concordance analysis, and diachronic corpus assisted discourse analysis. In each of these steps, the appearance of different dimensions of the country image was explored using a dimensional model for integrative country image analysis developed by Ingenhoff and Buhmann. The design of the mixed-method approach showcase how large quantities of textual data can be analyzed in a new diachronic approach, bringing strains of research from digital humanities to the field of public diplomacy.

Die Poster-Reihe des Digital Humanities Day Leipzig 2023 (DHDL) präsentiert eine facettenreiche Sammlung von Projekten und Forschungsarbeiten aus dem “Big Tent” der Digital Humanities und zeigt eindrucksvoll die interdisziplinären Verknüpfungen und die Breite des Feldes auf. Die Beiträge stammen von Forscher:innen aus Leipzig, aus der Region Mitteldeutschland und darüber hinaus. Sie bieten Einblicke in aktuelle Forschungsprojekte und demonstrieren die Anwendung digitaler Technologien in den Geisteswissenschaften. Beim DHDL 2023 stellten über 20 Gruppen aktuelle Forschungsprojekte in einer Poster-Session vor.

Der Digital Humanities Day Leipzig ist eine seit 2017 jährlich am Dies academicus stattfindende Veranstaltung des Forums für Digital Humanities Leipzig (FDHL; fdhl.info), welche die regionale und überregionale Vernetzung von DH-Akteur:innen zum Ziel hat