Modernity Critique Corpus in Derived Text Format

The Modernity Critique Corpus is a heterogeneous collection of 335 German-language literary prose texts published between 1750 and 2015. The corpus was created as part of the project “Modernity as Loss? Text Structures, Variants and Cycles of Literary Cultural Critique” funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG, project number 497113588). It contains texts (from trivial and high literature) that have been assigned by literary scholars to certain categories that are related to modernity critique in the broad sense:

1)      “civilization critique” (“Zivilisationskritik”),

2)      "modernity critique" (“Modernekritik”),

3)      "progress critique" (“Fortschrittskritik”),

4)      “critique of the present” ("Zeitkritik"),

5)      “critique of the present time" (“Gegenwartskritik”),

6)      “cultural critique" (“Kulturkritik”),

7)      "conservative revolution literature" (“Literatur der konservativen Revolution”),

8)      "decadence literature" (“Dekadenzliteratur”),

9)      “regional heritage art” ("Heimatkunst"),

10) "social critique" (“Sozialkritik”),

11) “society critique” (“Gesellschaftskritik”), and

12) “worldview literature” ("Weltanschaungsliteratur").

The ascription of these categories to the texts has been manually annotated in a corpus of literary handbooks and literary histories as well as specialized monographs/ edited volumes on some of these terms (see Gittel 2025). The annotation distinguishes between three types of ascriptions: expression (The work in question expresses X), role (X plays a role in the work in question) and cause (X is a cause of the work in question), where X represents one of the categories listed above. From the counts of ascriptions a categorical column (X + “_cat”) has been created for each category.

The text files were taken from the KOLIMO corpus (Lauer/Hermann 2017), which in turn is based on the repositories TextGrid (Neuroth/Rapp/Söring 2015), Deutsches Textarchiv (BBAW 2017) and Gutenberg-de (Reuters 2017), and from heterogenous other sources. All German-language literary prose texts were extracted from xml, pdf, epub, or other formats where necessary. The texts were semi-manually cleaned of paratextual elements (dedications, editor's comments, author names, etc.) for the needs of automated analyses. Furthermore, the texts have been normalized using DTA Cascaded Analysis Broker (Jurish 2012). The texts are contained in the so-called derived text format (Schöch et al. 2020).

The texts are available as document term matrices of 1000 word segments with a corresponding metadata table. For each work, the metadata table contains data on the author's name, author’s birth, author’s death, title of the work, first publication year, genre, file name, and information on the ascription of the modernity critique terms listed above.

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References:

Berlin-Brandenburgischen Akademie der Wissenschaften (Hrsg.) (2017): Deutsches Textarchiv. Grundlage für ein Referenzkorpus der neuhochdeutschen Sprache. Berlin. http://www.deutschestextarchiv.de/ [03.12.2020].

Gittel, Benjamin: „Gesellschaftskritik“, „Kulturkritik“, „Sozialkritik“, „Zeitkritik“ ... Zuschreibungen und textuelle Korrelate fiktional-literarischer Kritik. In: Zeitschrift für Germanistik, N.F. XXXV (2025), H. 1, S. 135–156 [accepted for publication].

Herrmann, Berenike / Lauer, Gerhard (2017): KOLIMO. A corpus of Literary Modernism for comparative analysis. https://kolimo.uni-goettingen.de/about [01.05.2020].

Jurish, Bryan: Finite-state Canonicalization Techniques for Historical German. PhD thesis, Universität Potsdam, 2012. URN urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus-55789.

Neuroth, Heike / Rapp, Andrea / Söring, Sibylle (Hrsg.) (2015): TextGrid: Von der Community — für die Community. Eine Virtuelle Forschungsumgebung für die Geisteswissenschaften. Universitätsverlag Göttingen, Verlag Werner Hülsbusch, Glückstadt.

Reuters, Hella (Hrsg.) (2017): Projekt Gutenberg-DE, Die weltweit größte kostenlose deutschsprachige Volltext-Literatursammlung. https://www.projekt-gutenberg.org/ [03.12.2020].

Schöch, Christof; Frédéric Döhl, Achim Rettinger, Evelyn Gius, Peer Trilcke, Peter Leinen, Fotis Jannidis, Maria Hinzmann, Jörg Röpke: Abgeleitete Textformate: Text und Data Mining mit urheberrechtlich geschützten Textbeständen. In: Zeitschrift für digitale Geisteswissenschaften. Wolfenbüttel 2020. DOI: 10.17175/2020_006