Romantic Cartographies

Lived and Imagined Space in English and German Romantic Texts, 1790–1840

Postdoctoral Project 2017–2022
Turku Institute for Advanced Studies & Academy of Finland
Dr. Asko Nivala
University of Turku

Romantic Cartographies (ROMCAR) was a digital humanities project (2017–2022) that studied the construction of space during the Romantic era (1790s–1840s).

ROMCAR applied named-entity linking (NEL) to extract toponyms from Romantic fiction and travelogues published in English and German. The results of text mining were visualised as superimposed maps, which produced new knowledge about the relationship of centre and periphery, or urban and natural areas in Romanticism.

This static website archives some findings of the project, while the original interactive web application has been discontinued. The dataset produced during the project is archived in OSF and the web application I wrote with Python has a GitHub repository.

Publications

Asko Nivala: The Construction of Space in English and German Literature 1790–1848: Geoparsing the Corvey Collection, Literary Geographies Vol. 9, No. 2 2023, pp. 352–376, OPEN ACCESS.
Asko Nivala: "Travelling in Romantic Bildungsroman Narratives." Romanticism 30(3) 2024, pp. 293–308, DOI:10.3366/rom.2024.0661.