conducted by: Thomas Gilli, Nico Kunkel
The project’s goal is to visualize the relation between histoire and discours. This formal distinction is crucial to Narratology and enables access to the temporal organization of literary texts as well as to their formal decoding. Moreover, this distinction seems to refer to text features that are apparently easy to identify.
While discours is a model for the linear array of the narrator’s speech acts as a reader perceives them (=How?), histoire depicts the events in their actual succession and thus as they had happened in the narrated world.
In order to discover and precisely determine the possibly recurrent patterns in temporal structures, the corpora of novellas that is being prepared in the research center’s context will be annotated and visualized with respect to these categories.
(Fig.: first sketch for visualization)
The project’s interests are both, methodological and technical. Narratological concepts will be confronted with technical means of annotation and visualization. Thus, histoire and discours come into view in their applicability for the purpose of annotation and visualization and thereby enabling us to scrutinize the conceptual and technical discrepancies and constraints that may result.
On the one hand, the methodological advantages of formal und structural text analysis will be examined; on the other hand, technical issues concerning efficient means of annotation and further data processing are to be explored.
