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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The assassination of Nikolay Bobrikov, the Governor-General of Finland, on 16 June 1904 was a turning point in Finnish history. It was reported in hundreds, if not thousands, of newspapers worldwide. This article follows the spread of that news, particularly its spread over the first week after the assassination. The study draws on the digital newspaper repositories in Australia, Austria, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Mexico, Sweden, the Netherlands and the United States.

Drawing on a new materialist approach, this article discusses the concepts of the virtual and virtual topology, and their fruitfulness for historians’ empirical work. It starts by following Gilles Deleuze’s argument that the virtual, the transformative potential of the real, has to be distinguished from the possible, which is merely an imagined double of the given world. Embracing this premise, the article shows the potential of virtual topology to shed light on the transformation of a network in the past.

Asko Nivala: The Romantic Idea of the Golden Age in Friedrich Schlegel’s Philosophy of History. Routledge, New York 2017, PREVIEW / ORDER. The nineteenth-century Romantic understanding of history is often confused with the longing for the past Golden Age. In this book, the Romantic idea of Golden Age is seen from a new angle by discussing it in the context of Friedrich Schlegel’s works. Interestingly, Schlegel argued that the concept of a past Golden Age in the beginning of history was itself a product of antiquity, imagined without any historical ground.