Our in-progress project analyzes digitized historical newspapers at a very large scale. It aims to: 1) trace the diffusion of the Romantic concept from its origin in German Romanticism to other countries, other languages, and other time periods; 2) unveil how the Romantic concept has changed in the past two hundred years.
Starting from the “Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung" (General Literature Gazette, 1785-1849) — an authoritative textual resource for research on German Romanticism, we have extracted named entities that represent the Romantic concept by using state-of-the-art NER methods. These NEs will then be searched in larger newspaper corpora.
Since the Romantic concept has moved beyond its original context and survived without mention of its representative figures (NEs), we also analyze the usage change of its related words and word groups by using sophisticated natural language processing (NLP) methods.