TNA Fellow Eduardo Fernández Guerrero
Distant reading of early modern prophecies across Europe: corpus formation and testing
This project proposes the creation of a proof of concept for a FAIR corpus of early modern Latin prophecies from the 16th century, exploring the hypothesis of their transnational nature. The primary objectives are to analyze the impact of socio-political contexts on prophetic literature, identify distinctive linguistic patterns and rhetorical devices, and understand their distinctiveness from other genres. Utilizing the applicant’s background in prophetic discourse, classical philology, and digital humanities, the project plans to employ sentiment analysis and POS tagging as methods to quantify shifts in emotional tone, mood, and grammatical structure. The project will also address challenges related to intertextuality, corpus balancing, and standardization of existing repositories. As a proof of concept carried out over three months, this project will lay the groundwork for the potential development of a comprehensive corpus. The resulting insights will deepen our understanding of the emotional and linguistic landscape of early modern prophetic literature, thereby shedding light on a significant, yet often overlooked, aspect of Western literature.
CLS INFRA Training School Madrid, “Digging for Gold”, occurred 9-11 May 2023. Eduardo Fernández (European University Institute, Italy), a participant in the Training School, talks about their research and what they are learning in the Training School.