TNA Fellow Richard Změlík

Building a Literary Corpus of the 19th Century Czech Prose

The aim of this project is to build a representative digital corpus of Czech narrative fiction texts that primarily represent Prague’s topography. the lower time limit for the collection of texts is the 19th century, or the second half of the 19th century, when texts explicitly thematising Prague topography are just beginning to appear in Czech literature; the upper limit is the 21st century. The original intention was to realize literary-cartographic models that would provide a systematic overview of the ways in which Prague’s topography was literarised. However, in the next phase of the project, the functionality of the corpus was expanded to offer, in addition to the cartographic models, a number of different quantitative models relating to selected aspects of literary texts. The language corpus itself, or tools for its mining, was added to the database of cartographic and quantitative models. As a result, the project is a multifunctional tool that will serve both literary scholars and linguists, and which, by combining cartographic and quantitative models together with corpus search tools, will enable multiple and variable types of analyses.

 

 

Check this short video to find out more about the project aims and outcomes as Richard Změlík talks us through his developments during his TNA fellowship.