Towards a contextualised spatial-diachronic history of literature: mapping emotional representations of the city and the country in P olish fiction from 1864 to 1939 (2022)

Abstract: In this article, we discuss the conditions surrounding the building of historical and literary corpora. We describe the assumptions and method of making the original corpus of the Polish novel (1864-1939). Then, we present the research procedure aimed at demonstrating the variability of the emotional value of the concept of “the city” and “the country” in the texts included in our corpus. The proposed method considers the complex socio-political nature of Central and Eastern Europe, especially the fact that there was no unified Polish state during this period. The method can be easily replicated in studies of the literature of countries with similar specificities.

## introduction the main objective of our paper is to introduce a comprehensive workflow employing nlp methods and linguistic linked open data (llod) that allows for conducting literary research in temporal and spatial dimensions while taking into account local specificities arising from historical, sociocultural, and infrastructural factors. the proposal addresses, on the one hand, the current criticism towards digital humanities (dh), in particular distant reading, and on the other hand, the call for a new way of describing the complex relationship between fiction and imaginary geography put forward in non-digital literary studies. criticism of the distant reading approach revolves around the gap between the development of methods and tools and the use of their potential to address new research questions or discover new phenomena. it has been argued that applications of nlp in literary research, while spectacular, are often limited to confirming already known insights @xcite , and that much of the research is aimed solely at the tools' validation @xcite . computational analysis of literary texts has also been criticised for reductionism, observation triviality, ahistoricism and the disregard of the socio-cultural determinants of the patterns detected @xcite . addressing the call arising from the above criticism, to embed computational analyses within broader disciplinary contexts and knowledge (underwood, 2019), the workflow we developed was tailored to current debates and trends in humanities research. we draw on studies within the horizons of geography of literature and literary affect studies, trends highly influential in contemporary humanities that emerged from the topographical and affective turns @xcite @xcite . our goal is to take into account local circumstances and to trace the impact of historical and spatial factors on the dynamics of literary processes. at the current stage, we focus on central and eastern europe (ceec). however, the workflow was designed for reusabil-ity and should be adaptable to other local contexts, including non-european. studies referring to ceec as a region undergoing extensive geopolitical changes, highly diverse in terms of nationality, language and culture, build more and more on linguistic resources and metadata for embedding literary texts in socio-cultural realities. although some ceec languages are on track to achieve a well-resourced status, there are still many gaps to bridge @xcite , especially in terms of historical resources. this applies not only to language technology (lt), but also to dh in general. there are very few solutions suited to the processing and analysis of literary texts, e.g. named entity recognition or stylometric analysis. moreover, the metadata produced by ceec institutions is incomplete and there is no single relevant and reliable metadata retrieving source. it leads to the necessity of combining various resources, mappings, and harmonisation of disparate data types @xcite . in the research presented in this paper, the workflow was applied to reconstruct the urban-rural dichotomy, i.e., the attribution of distinguishing values and emotions to urban and rural geo-entities, as a prominent example of reflection from the field of literary geography. this topic's long-standing presence in non-digital literary studies (e.g. @xcite ) resulted in the burden of cliché interpretations. not only do we intendwe intend to verify these interpretations, but also to broaden the scope of investigation by taking into account both historical and geographical dimensions, crucial for ceec-oriented research and neglected in literary studies. this will allow for a thorough evaluation of the workflow regarding its strengths and shortcomings. we surveyed polish novels from 1864 to 1939, representing three consecutive literary periods, positivism, young poland, and the interwar period. at the end of the 18th century, poland ceased to exist as a sovereign state. the polish territories were divided into three partitions and remained under the control of the habsburg monarchy, the kingdom of prussia and the russian empire until 1918. the partitions differed substantially in terms of the pace of socio-economic development, the extent of urbanisation, and civil liberties @xcite . these contrasts led to differences in the imaginary, including the dominant discourses of urbanity and rurality, which persisted even after poland regained independence @xcite . to reconstruct the evolution of the polish variant of the urban-rural dichotomy, we posed three research questions: (i) did the level of discrepancy between urban and rural depictions change over time?; (ii) how have the emotional representations of the city and the country changed over time; and (iii) did the form of the urban-rural dichotomy and the valuation of geo-entities vary according to the partition in which the unit was located?