The early nineteenth-century bildungsroman is often understood as a coming-of-age story of the protagonist, which implies that temporality is more constitutive for its composition than spatiality. In contrast, my paper focuses on the motif of travelling in German and British bildungsroman narratives. Opposed to the previous allegorical understanding of the Romantic bildungsroman, I suggest that the methods of the spatial humanities open up a new perspective on bildungsroman narratives by showing how their travel itineraries were used in the construction of Europe before and after the Napoleonic Wars.

Asko Nivala & Jasmine Westerlund: Suomenkielisten taiteilijaromaanien tilallisuus 1884–1939. Historiallinen Aikakauskirja, 1 / 2024, 4–21. Tässä artikkelissa tarkastelemme suomenkielisen taiteilijaromaanin tilallisuutta vuosina 1884–1939. Aineistonamme on ihmislukijoiden annotoima paperikortisto, jonka olemme digitoineet tietokannaksi. Tietokantaan sisältyy 70 taiteilijaromaania väliltä 1884–1939, joista 62 teosta sisältää paikkatietoja. Olemme keränneet kortistosta romaanien tapahtumapaikat ja tuoneet ne paikkatietojärjestelmän avulla kartoille. Kartoissa näkyy jännite kaupunkien ja maaseudun, rannikon ja sisämaan sekä pohjoisen ja etelän välillä, jota olemme tutkineet keskuksen ja periferian käsitteiden kautta.

Harri Kiiskinen, Asko Nivala, Jasmine Westerlund, and Juhana Saarelainen (2023). “Extracting Geographical References from Finnish Literature. Fully Automated Processing of Plain-Text Corpora”. Journal of Computational Literary Studies 2 (1), doi: https://doi.org/10.48694/jcls.3584. Abstract In the Atlas of Finnish Literature 1870-1940 project, we extract geographical information from a Finnish-language corpus of literary texts published between 1870 and 1940. The texts are transformed from plain texts to TEI/XML, and further processed with named entity recognition and linking tools.

In this article, I analyse named entity linking as a new method to study the construction of space in the English and German texts of European Literature, 1790–1840: The Corvey Collection. The Corvey Collection is among the most comprehensive datasets to have survived from the Romantic Era of literature. However, German-language documents in particular suffer from poor OCR scanning. To avoid noise caused by incorrectly digitized characters, I have re-OCRed the collection.

Miten kulttuurihistoria tulisi määritellä uusmaterialismin, posthu- manismin ja digitaalisen humanismin avatessa uusia näköaloja? Miten uudet suuntaukset rinnastuvat toisiinsa? Osoitan tässä artikkelissa, että digitaalisilla ihmistieteillä on positivismin sijasta runsaasti yhteistä uusmaterialismin ja posthumanismin kanssa, vaikka näitä suuntauksia ajatellaan usein erillisinä ja toisinaan jopa vastakkaisina. Asko Nivala, “Kulttuurihistoria, uusmaterialismi, posthumanismi ja digitaalinen humanismi”. Teoksessa Kulttuurihistorian tutkimus: Lähteistä menetelmiin ja tulkintaan. Toim. Rami Mähkä, Marika Ahonen, Niko Heikkilä, Sakari Ollitervo & Marika Räsänen. k & h, Turku 2022, 453–467.

Linking large digitized newspaper corpora in different languages that have become available in national and state libraries opens up new possibilities for the computational analysis of patterns of information flow across national and linguistic boundaries. The significant contribution this article presents is to demonstrate how word vector models can be used to explore the way concepts have shifted in meaning over time, as they migrated across space, by comparing newspapers from different countries published between 1840 and 1914.

Asko Nivala: ”Friedrich Schlegel and the Mystical Kingdom of God.” Mystik und Romantik. Eds. Günther Bonheim, Thomas Isermann & Thomas Regehly. Brill, Leiden 2021, 69–88.

Friedrich Hölderlinin Hyperion on kirjeromaani, jota on tavattu lukea sen päähenkilön ke- hityskertomuksena. Värikkäistä maisemakuvauksistaan tunnettu teos sijoittuu 1770-luvun Kreikkaan. Jos Hyperionia luetaan tilallisesti, millaisen kuvan se piirtää Kreikan alueesta? Asko Nivala: “Kreikan alue Friedrich Hölderlinin Hyperionissa” niin & näin, Nro 4, 2021, 77–87, OPEN ACCESS.

The chapter concentrates on the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and analyzes the ambiguous project of the Enlightenment. The eighteenth century has often been depicted as an era of progress, when new scientific inventions were made and disseminated while the middle class gained more economic and political influence. The 1750s was a turning point, however, after which European intellectual history started to show darker shades and a new sceptical attitude to progress arose.

Abstrakti The digital collections of newspapers have given rise to a growing interest in studying them with computational methods. This article contributes to this discussion by presenting a method for detecting text reuse in a large corpus of digitized texts. Empirically, the article is based on the corpus of newspapers and journals from the collection of the National Library of Finland. Often, digitized repositories offer only partial views of what actually was published in printed form.