The concept of nation in nineteenth-century Greek prose fiction through computational literary analysis

Koidaki Fotini, Despina Christou, Aikaterini Tiktopoulou, and Grigorios Tsoumakas. The concept of nation in nineteenth-century Greek fiction through computational literary analysis. Proceedings of the NLP4DH 2021 Workshop on Natural Language Processing for Digital Humanities. 2021

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Author(s): Fotini Koidaki, Despina Christou, Aikaterini Tiktopoulou, and Grigorios Tsoumakas

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2021, Christou, Tsoumakas

Abstract: How can the construction of national consciousness be captured in the literary production of a whole century? What can the macro-analysis of the 19th-century prose fiction reveal about the formation of the concept of the nation-state of Greece? How could the concept of nationality be detected in literary writing and then interpreted? These are the questions addressed by the research that is conducted in this paper and which focuses on exploring how the concept of the nation is figured and shaped in 19th-century Greek prose fiction. We propose a methodological approach that combines well-known text mining techniques with computational close reading methods in order to retrieve the nation related passages and to analyse them linguistically and semantically. The main objective of the paper at hand is to map the frequency and the phraseology of the nation-related references, as well as to explore phrase patterns in relation to topic modeling results.