Text encoding and ontology--enlarging an ontology by semi-automatic generated instances
Amélie Zöllner-Weber · Literary and Linguistic Computing · 2011
The challenge in literary computing is (1) to model texts, to produce digital editions and (2) to model the meaning of literary phenomena which readers have in their mind when reading a text. Recently, an approach was proposed to describe and present structure and attributes of literary characters (i.e. the mental representation in a reader’s mind), to explore, and to compare different representations using an ontology. In order to expand the ontology for literary characters, users must manually extract information about characters from literary texts and, again manually, add them to the ontology. In this contribution, I present an application that supports users when working with ontologies in literary studies. Therefore, semi-automatic suggestions for including information in an ontology are generated. The challenge of my approach is to encode aspects of literary characters in a text and to fit it automatically to the ontology of literary characters. The application has been tested by using an extract of the novel ‘Melmoth the Wanderer’ (1820), written by Charles Robert Maturin. For the main character, Melmoth, 72 instances were generated and assigned successfully to the ontology. In conclusion, I think that this approach is not limited to the theme of character descriptions; it can also be adapted to other topics in literary computing and Digital Humanities.