The Atlas of Finnish Literature 1870–1940

University of Eastern Finland DRDHum 2024 Conference Submission45 Authors

Keywords: Literary geography, digital humanities, maps, Finnish literature, cultural history, named entity recognition

TL;DR: In the project "Atlas of Finnish Literature 1870-1940" we have extracted geographical information from a corpus of literary texts and made an interactive webpage where you can place the information on a map

Abstract:

Atlas of Finnish Literature 1870–1940

The project Atlas of Finnish Literature 1870–1940 (the Alfred Kordelin Foundation – Major Cultural Projects 2022–2024) participates in the research tradition of literary cartography. Literary cartography, which emerged in the late 1990s as part of the spatial turn in the humanities, has, in the 2000s, adopted the methods of digital humanities. Our project applies these new methods for the first time to the study of Finnish fiction.

In the project Atlas of Finnish Literature 1870–1940, we have extracted geographical information from two corpora of literary texts (Project Lönnrot and Project Gutenberg) and developed an interactive web application where you can plot the spatial references from texts on a map. The texts were transformed from plain texts to TEI/XML and then processed with named entity recognition and linking tools. In this presentation, we introduce the process we have used: NER, geocoding and linking to external data sources.

We will also introduce the Atlas of Finnish Literature 1870–1940 web application, which is open to the public, and give research examples of the kind of information that can be found with the application. Our webpage contains 846 works from 1870 to 1944 that are geocoded. The application can be used for historical research, literary studies and geography. The database can be filtered and viewed by work, by author or by location. One can see, for example, where Santeri Ivalo’s Anna Fleming (1898) is situated, what is the spatial scope in Minna Canth’s works or which books mention Helsinki. Finally, we have added full-text search to the application, which brings interesting new possibilities to the study of Finnish fiction.

Submission Number: 45