Data-Mining the Digital Bookshelf

This is the first systematic attempt to utilize data-mining methods on a large scale within humanities research in Norway, applying them methods to discourses of race, class, religion and gender. The core research team has a proven record of scientific excellence, and the project has contributed to the rewriting of Norwegian literary history and highlight systematic discrimination against minoritized groups in Norwegian literature and Norwegian society in general during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Through one of the two Ph.D. dissertations completed during the project period the project has also contributed to a more nuanced understanding of the ?place? of women in Norway before the women?s movement commenced. Our main hypothesis has been that many of the conclusions that have been drawn by earlier scholars of Norwegian literary history are misleading or false because they are not properly grounded in empirical data and are influenced by an ideologically driven desire to represent Norway as homogenous, peaceful, liberal and democratic, which our research findings confirm.

Methodological a significant contribution relates to how to compensate for the significant OCR errors in the Bokhylla corpus, which are widespread whenever older books are digitized. The innovative hybrid approach that Johnsen and Karlsen have developed has been praised by world-leading digital humanities scholars as an excellent compromise compared to a single method for this type of search. The second contribution is thematic and relates to the broader Norwegian cultural discourse relating to minorities and to how minorities have been portrayed and discussed within literary studies. We have uncovered systematic discrimination and racism throughout both Norwegian literature and, most importantly, within the academic field of Norwegian literary studies during its early years (roughly 1890-1940). This has broad implications for how we reconceptualize the field, which in turn has significant impact in the way certain authors are taught in school and at university level throughout Norway.

This is the first systematic attempt to utilize data-mining methods on a large scale within humanities research in Norway, applying them methods to discourses of race, class, religion and gender. The core research team has a proven record of scientific excellence, and the project has the potential to rewrite Norwegian literary history and change our understanding of how literary culture informs and to a certain extent determines public discourse more broadly, and conversely how public discourse can shape literary culture. Our primary hypothesis is that many of the conclusions that have been drawn by earlier scholars of Norwegian literary history are misleading or false because they are not properly grounded in empirical data and are influenced by an ideologically-driven desire to represent Norway as homogenous, peaceful, liberal and democratic. We have identified a series of these conclusions that we find particularly problematic because they have been reproduced without proper critical examination, both within educational institutions and in literary histories. The writing of Norwegian literary history has, since at least Olaf Hansen's Norsk litteraturhistorie (1862), been harnessed for nationalistic purposes, yet the ways in which minority groups have been portrayed or excluded both by literary authors and by the literary historians who analyzed and disseminated this literature has not yet been systematically examined. Nor is the exclusion of women, the lower classes, and religious minorities sufficiently understood. What we do know about the writing of Norwegian literary history suggests a disturbing level of discrimination and racism that appear to be a central part of the field's own history.