The concept of nation in nineteenth-century G reek fiction through computational literary analysis (2021)

Abstract: How the construction of national consciousness may 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 published in this paper and which focuses on exploring how the concept of the nation is figured and shaped in 19th-century Greek prose fiction. This paper proposes 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 analyze 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 the phrase patterns in relation to the topic modeling results.

## introduction even though literature is not the accurate representation of reality, the literary text is actively participating in the formation of the cultural identity of the community in which it is written and read. as far as the national identity is concerned, the literary discourse is interwoven with the processes of formation and negotiation of the nationalistic ties of a community, since it not only is embodied through the most important nation-building tool, language, but reflects and, at the same time, shapes the collective conscious. the paper at hand presents and discusses the data-set, as well as the results, of a research project that was focused on exploring and analysing how the concept of nation is figured in greek prose fiction of the 19th century. the 19th century is of considerable cultural and political importance for greece since this was a decisive period for the flourishing of greek letters and for the course of greek history in general. the 19th century was the century of greek ethnogenesis, which had a great influence on the european movement of nation-states @xcite . the greek revolution of 1821 was the first successful liberal-national uprising in europe because, after the fall of napoleon and the congress of vienna, the authoritarian monarchies had been restored in the continent. the greek war of independence that launched exactly 200 years ago, ended the 400 years of ottoman rule in the greek territory, and resulted in the establishment of the first hellenic republic that led to the formation of the modern state of greece. during the 19th century and in parallel with the building of independent greece, typography emerged and flourished in the newlyborn state. newspapers, journals, and publishing houses appeared and multiplied over the century, revealing this way the escalation of publishing activity in greece and the consequent flowering of letters @xcite . the explosion of literary publishing, which scaled up especially around 1880-1900, as well as the increase printing industry is evidence of the rise of literacy levels among greek citizens. at the same time, the role of literary people in the greek language controversy that arose before the revolution, the refuge that several revolutionists found in literature and particularly in self-narration, as well as the connection established between national and literary language, provide evidence demonstrating the service of literature to the national purpose. in this context, our research aims to explore how the nation concept is figured in the 19th-century greek prose fiction in order to address questions regarding the presence of the concept of nation in novelistic tradition, but also the discussion and the conceptualisation of it. the rest of this paper is structured as follows. section 2 presents background material concerning computational analysis of the notion of nation in literature. next, we outline the dataset generated (section 3), the methodology developed (section 4), as well as the findings of our research (section 5). finally, section 6 presents the conclusions of our work. ## background the 19th century is the century of the formation of nation states. the relation between literature and (romantic) nationalism has been discussed for almost a century @xcite @xcite . literature is known to be one of the major contributory factors in the nation-building process, both because it is embodied through language -that is one of the most important characteristics of collective identity-and because it has the power of building a national audience. in the case of the creation of the greek nation state, researchers from different fields have focused on aspects of the national character's building in the pre-revolutionary and post-revolutionary years and have commented on the reflection of these aspects in the periodical press of the 19th century, in texts of various types written by greek and european scholars during this period, in specific authors and in selectively chosen literary texts. 1 the investiga-tion of the issues of nation-building and national self-determination in a corpus of modern greek prose of the 19th century is attempted for the first time here. on the other hand, the attempts to computationally analyse the representation of nationality in literature are limited. for example, @xcite explores the national trends in gothic fiction using topic modeling along with a qualitative approach of close reading and contextualization, while @xcite count the geographic mentions (using ner models, part-of-speech tagging, place names gazetteer) and national phrases (taken form the "history of" wikipedia page) in narration to find out the level of national attention in contemporary european fiction across multiple national contexts. to our knowledge, we are the first to computationally analyse the concept of nation in modern greek fiction of the 19th century. ## data to explore the concept of the nation in 19th century greek prose fiction, we needed to create a literary corpus because, as yet, there are no corpora of 19th century greek prose fiction available. considering the project timescales and the financial factors, we built a micro-corpus, which we digitised and further processed to develop a final dataset that could provide sufficient knowledge to answer the questions posed by this project. among the corpus-building criteria that we defined, and which were related to the language, the date, and the type of publication, the comprehensive and balanced representation of the 19thcentury greek novelists was very important. therefore, we didn't limit our corpus to the literary canon. instead, we decided to include every novelist published in the greek language during the 19th century, such as lesser-known artists, novelists publishing in districts outside the capital of athens, a foreign author who wrote in the greek language and printed outside greece, as well as an unknown author. however, because the literary production of each author differs in size, we decided to select one title of each novelist to save time and maintain balance. consequently, we have chosen the most representative work of each author, while taking into account the publication dates to ensure enough samples from every decade of the century. finally, edited by a. tampaki, and ou. polikandrioti @xcite . the final corpus, which corresponds to more than 16000 pages, was digitised on the transkribus 2 platform with an ocr model that we trained by transcribing a 150-page (35.223 words) sample of the three most common fonts of our corpus @xcite . to reduce the noise that would affect the accuracy of the text mining tasks, we massively processed the ocred files by treating cases such as hyphenation, watermarks, repetitive page headers, additional noisy characters, etc. figure 1 demonstrates word-counts distribution in the 19th century after the post-processing phase. as we focus on such a specific topic as the nation is, we decided to prioritise a keyword-based passage retrieval approach, since this would allow us to collect and analyse all the nation-related passages contained in our corpus. the main idea was to establish a knowledge base featuring all the direct references to the concept of the nation comprised in greek prose fiction, and which could be further studied, enriched, and analysed to answer the questions our project addresses. therefore, the first step was to design the keyword query by defining the keywords of interest. considering the available greek dictionaries of the 19th century, we 2 https://readcoop.eu/transkribus/ defined seven keyword-stems related either to the nation in general or to the greek nation in particular (translated from greek language: nation, homeland, tribe, genus, hellas, greek, romios foot_1 ). for each of these keywords, we built a vocabulary, where we specified all the different grammatical forms derived from the seven stems, their possible spelling variations, as well as the unacceptable lexical types that may also derive from the same stems. these vocabularies allowed us to capture as many tokens as possible regardless of those including typos, spelling mistakes, idiom variations, or ocr noise. the retrieved passages were organised on a tabular dataset and further enriched with various metainformation related to the passage-itself, the related keyword, and its parent document. 4 the passage retrieval was defined at the sentence level and not at the paragraph or phrase level, as the sentence, which is the smallest grammatical unit expressing a complete thought, would provide us with a sufficient sample to observe the concept of the nation in its context. therefore, for each keyword captured, the query returned the complete sentence containing it alongside the matched keyword-stem and other useful meta-information. this suggests that in cases where more than one keyword was located in the same sentence, as many entries were created as the keywords captured in the sentence. therefore, to monitor the findings' density and distribution in the documents, we assigned numeric identifiers to the sentences ("sentence-id") to observe the references through sentences. in the first step, a typical entry comprised the matched keyword, the complete grammatical sentence containing it, the "sentence-id", as well as useful metadata about the parent document (title, author, publication date, total sentence count, total words count). however, the dataset was evaluated and further enriched. we repeatedly evaluated at least a random 10 percent of every keywords' results in order to fine-tune and optimise the keyword-vocabularies of the query. based on the deficiencies observed, we decided to further evaluate the findings of two specific keywords (tribe, genus) in order to reduce noise caused by the findings that were not related to the concept of the nation. having denoised the results as much as possible, we semantically enriched further the dataset with the geographical entities that we automatically extracted from the retrieved passages. the final, evaluated and enriched version of the dataset is comprised of 8015 entries capturing and annotating individual references to the concept of the nation in the corpus of 19th-century greek prose fiction. ## methodology the generated dataset forms a topic-specific knowledge base that brings together all the nation-related references captured in the ninety-one nineteenthcentury greek novels presented above. to address the questions posed by the research, we subjected the dataset both to a statistical and linguistic analysis by combining well-known text mining techniques. for instance, by grouping and filtering the dataset based on the collected metadata, we managed to develop a successively better picture about the frequency of the nation-concept occurrence and its presence in the corpus of the 19th century in general. in the following, we deepened into a semantic analysis of the nation-related references to further understand the context describing the concept of nation. precisely, we extracted the collocations around each nation-related keyword and all keywords to better understand the discussed topics in each keyword and their entire set, respectively. the lack of language processing tools (pos tags, stopwords) for the specific greek language forms (dimotiki and katharevousa) of the 19th centuryalso characterizing our corpus -led us to combine tools developed for ancient-and modern-greek language. for instance, the lack of pos taggers for the specific era guided us to enhance the stopword list by combining ancient-and modern-greek stopwords lists, which we also enhanced with common ocr misspellings. at last, we extracted clusters of words, i.e., words that frequently occur together, from the passages using topic modeling. precisely, we used the latent dirichlet allocation foot_3 (lda) @xcite , the prevailing generative probabilistic topic model, to detect the thematic information of our archive. after hyper-parameters tuning, we concluded in fourteen (14) topics, among which there exists a topic that seems to be highly related to the concept of the nation-state. finally, in order to read 5 analysis ## conclusions considering the challenge of the 19th-century greek language, computational analysis of prose fiction offered us valuable insights into the special issue of the construction of the national identity. using the keyword-based retrieval technique we managed to track down all the direct references to the concept of the nation. the statistical analysis of these findings allowed us to observe the size and the frequency of the nation-relate discussion across our corpus and its timeline. in order to produce accurate and realistic measurements, we used metadata about the length of each document that enabled us to estimate the rates of nation-related references across the corpus. as an overall observation on the presence of the concept of nation in our corpus, it was noticed an increasing and escalating tendency during the last two decades of the century. focusing on the phraseology of the nationrelated references, we also attempted to identify the vocabulary through which the concept of the nation is expressed and shaped. by counting the retrieved keywords, we confirmed the greek peoples' preference -witnessed by non-literary sourcesto self-determine themselves as hellines (singular hellin) rather than romios or graecus. moreover, the keywords we defined as direct references to the nation, were further analyzed with a focus on their collocations. the collocations extracted reflect aspects of the greek national identity and milestones of the greek history of the 19th century related either to the war (of independence) or the challenges of the nation-building process. however, the collocations' word clouds may provide a slightly different picture of that we get by analysing the topic modeling results. in fact, the results of the collocation analysis were found to be associated with one of the thematic patterns that have the highest probability in the corpus. this topic, which is the third words' cluster in the topic modeling analysis, brings together terms that are linked to the nation and refer, as mentioned above, either to the war of independence or to the institutionalisation and the governance. considering the several versions that the topic may form by the adjustments of the relevance value, we notice that the concept of the nation is present in a topic that, at the same time, reflects the pragmatic challenges of the state-building process (i.e. government, governor, king, money, elections). at the same time, the collocations bring together terms that make up the picture of romantic nationalism, since they combine concepts like justice, idea, freedom, glory, honor, soul, heart, life, hope, belief, union. the methodological approach described above enabled us to observe the concept of the nation in the corpus of 19th-century greek prose fiction we built. however, the result, as well as the method, could be further enriched and developed both by extending the content of the corpus and by developing a 19th-century specific language toolkit, which would provide us with more detailed and comprehensive insights into the 19th century greek literature.