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Papers by Giulia Grisot

Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research), Dec 23, 2022

Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research), Apr 12, 2021

Der Beitrag schildert die intensive Zusammenarbeit zwischen Fachwissenschaftler:innen und der Uni... more Der Beitrag schildert die intensive Zusammenarbeit zwischen Fachwissenschaftler:innen und der Universitätsbibliothek Basel in einem korpusliteraturwissenschaftlichen DH-Projekt. Mit dem Auftrag zur Erstellung eines möglichst umfassenden Metadatensatzes Deutschschweizer Werke eines bestimmten Zeitraums mit definierten Parametern und der daran anschliessenden Retrodigitalisierung ausgewählter Objekte übernahm die Bibliothek die Aufgabe, eine valide Datengrundlage für das Forschungsprojekt zu schaffen. Erreichter Meilenstein im Forschungsprojekt war die erstmalige datenbasierte Schätzung des Umfangs fiktionaler Erzählliteratur 1880-1930 von Deutschschweizer Autor:innen (7'000-10'000 Titel). Im Beitrag werden nicht nur die Methoden zur Erhebung der benötigten Daten beschrieben, sondern in der Retrospektive das Vorgehen auch kritisch hinterfragt, um abschliessend Lessons Learned und Desiderata bei der Umsetzung solcher Projekte in Kooperation mit Bibliotheken zu formulieren. This article describes the intensive cooperation between researchers and the University Library of Basel in a corpus literary studies DH project. With the task of creating a comprehensive metadata set of Swiss-German works of a certain period with defined parameters and the subsequent retro-digitisation of selected objects, the library took on the task of creating a valid meta-data foundation for the research project. The milestone achieved in the research project was the first data-based estimate of the volume of fictional narrative literature 1880-1930 by Swiss-German authors (7,000-10,000 titles). The article not only describes the methods used to collect the necessary data, but also critically examines the procedure in retrospect in order to formulate lessons learned and desiderata for the implementation of such projects in cooperation with libraries. 1. Einleitung Er treibt den trägen Schwarm von schwer=beleibten Kühen, Mit freudigem Gebrüll, sich im bethauten Steg, Sie irren langsam um, wo Klee und Muttern blühen, Und mäh'n das zarte Gras mit scharfen Zungen weg: Er aber setzet sich bey einem Wasser=Falle, Und ruft mit seinem Horn dem lauten Widerhalle.

Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research), Mar 7, 2022

This thesis aims to explore the processes that readers engage in when they encounter difficulties... more This thesis aims to explore the processes that readers engage in when they encounter difficulties in literary texts and to add scientific value to existing theoretical assumptions about difficult literature, combining stylistic analyses with psycholinguistic research methods. The research focuses on complex techniques of speech, thought and consciousness presentation, using offline surveys and eye tracking to examine the mechanisms by which readers understand and process them. Approaches combining stylistic analyses, cognitive linguistics and psycholinguistic research methods are rare, and previous work has focused almost exclusively on poetry. My work sets to address this gap in understanding how readers respond to and process complex narratives. This research focuses on Virginia Woolf's most popular novels: To the Lighthouse and Mrs Dalloway. These are generally considered to be difficult by literary critics, and are believed to represent a challenge for readers, especially because of her experimental use of techniques of speech, thought and consciousness presentation. Using an innovative mixed methods approach, I analysed Woolf's two novels and isolated eight extracts that contain potential difficulties related to the use of these techniques, in particular ambiguous shifts between perspectives and between different modes of speech and thought presentation. First, a questionnaire was used to verify whether these passages are indeed perceived as difficult by readers, and whether that perception is caused by the hypothesised features. Participants gave the original extracts significantly higher difficulty ratings than modified versions, which had been simplified by removing or altering hypothesised difficulties. When asked to attribute perspectives to the texts, they attributed significantly more perspectives to the original extracts in comparison to the modified ones, suggesting they experienced more difficulty in the comprehension of the original extracts. This approach provided a strong foundation to more precisely investigate how difficulties impact reading through the use of eye tracking. Eye tracking allows for natural reading and provides a metric of processing effort, whilst indicating where readers are attending when they encounter difficulties or whether they reread passages to make sense of new information. However, almost no literature exists on the application of eye tracking to narrative texts. The existing literature on reading, mostly of sentences in isolation, suggests that when faced with a difficulty in comprehension, readers typically produce more and longer Fixations, more Regressions and longer Total Reading Time. Some results were consistent with these typical patterns but others were not. Some extracts did not elicit consistent behaviours in all readers; some readers demonstrated longer and more fixations and a higher skipping rate for the modified texts compared to the (more complex) original passages. Closer examination of two extracts, which repeatedly showed inconsistent reading behaviours, did not highlight any specific pattern or feature which could explain these differences in readers' behaviour. Notably, words which are often skipped during reading – function words, pronouns, conjunctions, short verbs – seem to play an important role in the processing of Woolf's texts. These results raise several questions in relation to the nature of the difficulty reported by readers of Woolf's novels, and provide a sound basis for future research in literary understanding, and, hopefully, an inspiration for future eye tracking studies in re-evaluating the role and effects of difficulty in the processing of authentic literary texts

Journal of Cultural Analytics

Journal of Cultural Analytics, 2023

This paper presents a quantitative analysis of the representation and affective encoding of ficti... more This paper presents a quantitative analysis of the representation and affective encoding of fictional space in a corpus of 125 Swiss literary prose texts of the 19th and early 20th Century written in German, offering a contribution to both spatial and affective literary studies. Motivated by questions about the iconic dichotomy between 'urban' and 'rural/ natural' space in literary works (Sengle; Fournier; Nell and Weiland)-and in Swiss literature around 1900 in particular (Rehm)-we use computational methods to detect and examine how different types of space are distributed and affectively encoded in German-Swiss literature. Taking into account the complexity of cultural perceptions and representations of space across history, we examine the presence of 'urban' and 'rural/natural' fictional spaces and their potential role in constructing a 'Swiss' national literature (Böhler; Zimmer), and their affective encoding. In order to do this, we first compiled a comprehensive dictionary of named and non-named spatial entities in the broad spatial categories RURAL and URBAN, and examined the presence of sentiment and emotions (valence and discrete emotions) and their 'strength' (arousal) in relation to these. We used current state-of-the-art sentiment lexicons for German available to the digital humanities community. Similarly to Heuser et al., we mapped the spatial entities and the sentiment lexicons onto our corpus, and focused on spans of +/-50 words around the detected entities, in order to examine the specific sentiment and emotions related to space. In an exploratory analysis, we offer here a first-time data-driven perspective on rural and urban fictional space, incorporating the dimension of affective encoding of space systematically.

University of Nottingham, Jul 31, 2020

Language and Literature: International Journal of Stylistics, 2020

Woolf’s work has been the object of several studies concerned with her experimental use of techni... more Woolf’s work has been the object of several studies concerned with her experimental use of techniques of speech, thought and consciousness presentation. These investigated the way in which different perspectives coexist and alternate in her writing, suggesting that the use of such techniques often results in ambiguous perspective shifts. However, there is hardly any empirical evidence as to whether readers experience difficulty while reading her narratives as a result of these narrative techniques. This article examines empirically readers’ responses to extracts from Woolf’s two major novels – To the Lighthouse and Mrs Dalloway – to provide evidence for whether Woolf’s techniques for the presentation of characters’ voices, thoughts and perspectives represent a challenge for readers. To achieve this, a mixed-methods approach that combines a stylistic analysis with a detailed questionnaire has been employed. Selected extracts that were hypothesised to be complex due to the presence of...

<pre>We present here a dataset of Swiss-German literary texts of the period 1880-1990 (nove... more <pre>We present here a dataset of Swiss-German literary texts of the period 1880-1990 (novels, short stories) - including titles and metadata - as well the scripts used to retrieve them. The files contained are the following: - merged_dataset_unique: complete list of the works retrieved (not limited to the period of interest) - dataset_1880_1930: list of 1880-1930 works - python scripts used to scrape metadata and extra information - r script used to fnalise the dataset structure * Scripts and data collected and documented under FAIR principles </pre>

Language and Literature, 2020

Woolf's work has been the object of several studies concerned with her experimental use of techni... more Woolf's work has been the object of several studies concerned with her experimental use of techniques of speech, thought and consciousness presentation. These investigated the way in which different perspectives coexist and alternate in her writing, suggesting that the use of such techniques often results in ambiguous perspective shifts. However, there is hardly any empirical evidence as to whether readers experience difficulty while reading her narratives as a result of these narrative techniques. This article examines empirically readers' responses to extracts from Woolf's two major novels-To the Lighthouse and Mrs Dalloway-to provide evidence to whether Woolf's techniques for the presentation of characters' voices, thoughts and perspectives represent a challenge for readers. To achieve this, a mixed-methods approach that combines a stylistic analysis with a detailed questionnaire has been employed. Selected extracts that were hypothesised to be complex due to the presence of free indirect style and/or interior monologue were modified by substituting these with less ambiguous modes of consciousness presentation, such as direct speech or direct thought. Readers' responses to the modified and unmodified versions of the same extracts were compared: results show that the presence of free indirect style and/or interior monologue increases the number of perspectives identified by readers, suggesting that this technique increases the texts' difficulty, laying a more solid ground for future investigations.

Conference Presentations by Giulia Grisot