The Writing and the Territory: Argentina Revisited in Digital Scholarly Editions

DEL RIO RIANDE, GIMENA

Digital Humanities in Medieval and Early Modern Spanish Texts

Routledge

Año: 2023;

Investigating close and distant reading approaches to the narratives of the Argentine space from the 16th to the 18th century entails building on previous work in various areas of research. The chapter delves into the formalization of models of narrative space. It is also concerned with text encoding and geographic annotation as methods for the close study of narrative space and narratives of space in the digital edition of a corpus of colonial texts that describe for the first time the Río de la Plata region. These close reading techniques will be then compared to quantitative methods stemming from Computational Linguistics and Information Retrieval to examine the same scenario from a distance.From the point of view of Literary Studies, general narratological approaches to the topic, as well as previous investigations on narratives of the Argentinian space are relevant points of reference for this chapter (Morillas Ventura 2008). Also, the approaches of Literary Geography, Literary Cartography, and Geohumanities usually rely on explicit mentions of toponyms to build their data basis. Both of these disciplines allowed the Literary Cartography to emerge (Piatti et al. 2009), which highlights the scenery of literary works, understanding landscape as something to be read even beyond genres like travelogues, chronicles, memoirs, etc. (Bushell 2012: 151). However, the constitution of narrative space is usually defined by more complex factors, as well, which has already been investigated in narratological works on space, but has rarely been taken up in the Digital Humanities. An event region designates a space which is relevant for the plot while mentioned spatial facts do not directly relate to situations in the narration. The textual encoding of texts in digital format, enriching them for example with metadata, structural, semantic and geographic information, opens the texts up to a computational treatment. Still, depending on how the information is added and used, these practices are in the first place related to a close reading of the texts, aimed at the thorough interpretation of the individual texts. When annotations are realized automatically without the possibility for comprehensive manual verification and when the digital texts are interpreted on the basis of quantified analysis results and their visualization, the digital techniques can be understood as modes of distant reading, where the textual structure is dissolved in order to generate abstract views (Moretti 2005, 2013; Jockers 2013; Jänicke et al. 2015). ISBN en trámite.