Mapping a Landscape of Texts
Thomas Crombez · Performance Research · 2012
What does ‘mapping’ mean when applied to a large corpus of artistic documents one wishes to examine? How can the methodologies of ‘distant reading’ (Franco Moretti) be applied to contemporary performative writing? In order to translate a corpus of texts into a spatial map, this paper proposes to use tools from computational linguistics and information visualization. For the research project ‘Belgium is Happening’, a large corpus of performative writings from Flemish and Dutch post-war theatre was digitized. These were processed computationally in order to determine their intertextual distances. Next, the set of all document nodes and their intertextual distances was visualized as a series of network graphs. The resulting graphs clearly distinguish authorship clusters. They make clear which authors wrote in a closely related style, and help to identify specific subgenres of experimental writing and style. Such a map literally provides a bird's eye view of the different experimental texts, and it also makes it possible to question existing groupings in literary history using the results of the automatic clustering approach.