« Using Natural language processing to explore literary criticism: a case study (Italian literature in the Mercure de France, 1890-1918) »: Navigating Change and Enduring as Language Instruction Faces Challenges, (NeMLA roundtable)

International audienceThis paper aims to present the results of an ongoing interdisciplinary research project at the intersection between Italian Studies and Natural language processing. The Labex OBVIL (Sorbonne Université) has developed Ariane (https://obvil.huma-num.fr/ariane/mdf/search), a tool which automatically identifies the linguistic markers of modality in literary texts. Our goal is to use Ariane to explore a corpus of over 200 articles published in the Mercure de France, one of France’s mot prestigious literary magazines. These articles all focus on contemporary Italian literature and were published between 1890 and 1918. Over the years, the Mercure de France counted several columnists who specialised in contemporary Italian literature and sometimes strongly disagreed with one another on Italian writers and Italian literary tendencies: Remy de Gourmont (A. Zanoni), Luciano Zuccoli, Ricciotto Canudo and Giovanni Papini, in particular. We intend to use Ariane to highlight the main modalities that can be observed in the corpus, so as to get a precise picture of each columnist’s critical tendencies. Studying the Mercure de France’s point of view on Italian literature is all the more important than the magazine was widely read in Italy, to the extent that its reviews could influence the writers’ literary fate. This paper also aims to analyse the advantages and the disadvantages of building such a collaborative project in an interdisciplinary Digital Humanities lab which counts only one specialist in Italian Studies