Abstract
We apply an interdisciplinary methodology to establish a digital-driven narratology of space on Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Two approaches are employed: 1. We highlight the importance of nature in the text by exploring the frequencies of architectural and natural terms. 2. We delve into a single episode of the text (Cadmus) by using a collocation-network-approach that reveals the interrelations between characters and settings. We show that the results can feed an analysis in the light of Lotman’s model of space semantics.
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Notes
- 1.
By doing so and by presenting the results in English we will operate with no less than three different languages (Latin/German/English). We are aware of the shortcomings connected to the multiplicity of languages. Since the project as presented is designed to blend in a larger project in which comparative linguistics plays a key role we hope to expand our analysis fully to both Latin and German to achieve by comparison a deeper insight into how space is created in Latin and German (literary) texts.
- 2.
WebLicht: Web-Based Linguistic Chaining Tool https://weblicht.sfs.uni-tuebingen.de/.
- 3.
Up to now, the corpus for comparisons mainly consists of texts from the 17th to the 19th century. We plan to include more contemporary texts in future work.
- 4.
All distributions are based on the relative frequencies of the natural and architectural terms in the Metamorphoses and the average of the relative frequencies in the corpus. The 15 segments consist of the 15 books of the Metamorphoses and of equally divided chunks from the texts in the corpus.
- 5.
We tested this with the Wilcoxon rank-sum test (p=1.289e-08) as well as Mood’s median test (p=1.289345e-08).
- 6.
Nature: 0.0860 (variance), 0.2932 (standard deviation); architecture: 0.0085 (variance), 0.0919 (standard deviation).
- 7.
This view receives support from the Index of passages discussed in (Boyle 2003, p. 299) which shows a clear domination of book 15.
- 8.
Periphrases of proper names (e.g. ‘Agenor’s son’ for ‘Cadmus’) have been dissolved and subsumed under the same node. In contrast, co-references indicated by pronouns have not been considered yet.
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Viehhauser, G., Kirstein, R., Barth, F., Pairamidis, A. (2018). Cadmus and the Cow: A Digital Narratology of Space in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. In: Fogliaroni, P., Ballatore, A., Clementini, E. (eds) Proceedings of Workshops and Posters at the 13th International Conference on Spatial Information Theory (COSIT 2017). COSIT 2017. Lecture Notes in Geoinformation and Cartography. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-63946-8_46
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