Towards Modeling the European Novel. Introducing ELTeC for Multilingual and Pluricultural Distant Reading

This contribution reports on the collaborative effort of building an open access multilingual corpus of European novels published 1840-1920 (the European Literary Text Collection - ELTeC) within the COST Action "Distant Reading for European Literary History" (COST Action CA16204). Working at the intersection of many languages and cultures, we address practical and technical aspects of corpus design based on a theoretical discussion of pluri-cultural computational modeling of literature. In the corpus design, we adopt a metadata-based approach that allows for representing the diversity of novels published 1840-1920 across Europe. Our sampling and balancing criteria use metadata including publication date, text length, reprint counts and authors’ gender, and we deliberately focus on inclusion of non-canonical novels. While one overarching goal of the project is the distant reading of European novels, this contribution puts its main focus on the theoretical and technical dimensions of corpus creation