Borderlands of text mapping: Experiments on Fontane's Brandenburg

Abstract

This article deals with the detection and projection of spatial patterns in text collections. Especially for historical corpora, researchers face a lack of general-purpose tooling. In these experiments, different maps focusing on Brandenburg at the second half of the 19th century are created based on literary works by Theodor Fontane. Using a common ground for hypothesis testing and visualization, issues related to data curation and preparation, text processing and geocoding are presented and discussed: the abstract, static nature of the results should be made up for by particular scrutiny and contextualization, by critical machine reading and by adding depth through visual cues.