Papers by Elisabeth Hobisch
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research), May 12, 2023
The Covid-19 pandemic continuously affects people around the world, exposing the already existing... more The Covid-19 pandemic continuously affects people around the world, exposing the already existing social interconnectedness and economic interdependencies of our times. Revisiting pandemic fiction, as well as, crises narratives in literature and other cultural productions in general, has suddenly become a coping strategy to counteract the effects of physical distancing, but in particular the experiences of lockdowns. Interestingly, since the early stages of the pandemic in the Western world in spring 2020, numerous artists have not only dissected the reality of confinement across diverse genres but more so provided the public with uplifting content in various audiovisual formatssuch as short films, web series, and music videos. In this article we will mainly take on the latter producing material about the pandemic during the pandemic, portraying the human need for connection, uplifting narratives and images. Across national, cultural, and linguistic borders, Corona Fictions (cf. Research Group Pandemic Fictions 2020) demonstrate how fragile our social fabric is while, at the same time, strengthening the feeling of solidarity, togetherness/ unity, and cohesion. Hence, this article will examine Corona Fictions music videos for their understanding and depiction of uplifting narratives in these challenging times.
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research), Jun 13, 2023
The interdisciplinary conference entitled Pandemic Protagonists. Viral (Re)Actions in Pandemic an... more The interdisciplinary conference entitled Pandemic Protagonists. Viral (Re)Actions in Pandemic and Corona Fictions was held as part of the Corona Fictions project 2 from June 1 st to June 3 rd , 2023, at Graz University of Technology. It marked the culmination of a year of joint work on the recently published volume of the same title 3 , which stood at the center of the conference. Within this framework, the organising committee 4 invited all scholars whose contributions had appeared in the volume.
Edition Kulturwissenschaft, Apr 3, 2023
transcript Verlag eBooks, Dec 31, 2023
transcript Verlag eBooks, Dec 31, 2023
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research), Jan 12, 2023
The Corona Fictions Database 2 is an essential part of the research project Corona Fictions. On V... more The Corona Fictions Database 2 is an essential part of the research project Corona Fictions. On Viral Narratives in Times of Pandemics funded by the Austrian Science Fund FWF (P 34571-G). The team members are Elisabeth Hobisch, Yvonne Völkl (project leader), Julia Obermayr, Tommaso Meozzi, Albert Göschl and Daniel Milkovits. 3 As a result of the Covid-19 health crisis declared as a pandemic in early March 2020 (cf. Adhanom Ghebreyesus 2020), political and media discourse focused mainly on medical and economical solutions to thwart and contain the pandemic. The public, however, largely turned to cultural productions in order to make meaning of and to cope with this unprecedented event (cf. Obermayr/Völkl 2022a). The main purpose of the Corona Fictions project is to collect, categorize and analyze the cultural production resulting from this global pandemic, in regards to its social function and constitutive power determining how we perceive this extraordinary situation. In order to understand the composition, compilation and functioning of the Corona Fictions Database, we describe in the following the corpus entering the bibliographical database, the process of data collection and structuringincluding the specific challenges encountered in this processas well as the functionality of the database. Corona Fictions When the Covid-19 pandemic was declared, on the one hand, people started to consult existing 'pandemic fictions', meaning "literary and cultural productions, which rely strongly on the representation and functionalization of epi-and pandemics" (Research Group Pandemic Fictions 2020, 323). On the other hand, they started to produce their own narratives in diverse media to process these extraordinary experiences. Within weeks and months, authors and directorsprofessional and non professional alikecreated and distributed countless diaries, anthologies of essays and poems, web series and music videos, often online. Knowing that generally cultural productions not only document life as it is, but also determine and modify our view of the world, 4 the main objective of our open access database is to document Corona Fictions, understood as a constitutive factor of what people experience as the Covid-19 pandemic and as a future cultural heritage. Our main focus lies on the romance languages Spanish, Italian and French, but as the pandemicaccording to its natureis happening on a global scale, we are also inclined to additionally include cultural productions in other languages into our database.
Pensamiento, Pandemia y Big Data
En marzo de 2020, cuando la OMS declaró la pandemia de COVID-19, 1 de repente, las sociedades del... more En marzo de 2020, cuando la OMS declaró la pandemia de COVID-19, 1 de repente, las sociedades del mundo entero se encontraron en estado de emergencia. Mientras la política empezó a consultar a especialistas médicos, tales como virólogxs, epidemiólogxs y expertxs en salud pública, la gente empezó a gestionar la situación consultando producciones culturales existentes sobre situaciones similares. Hubo, por ejemplo, una lectura pública en línea de La peste (1947) de Albert Camus en Austria 2 y en las librerías se agotaron los libros relacionados con enfermedades y epidemias. A la vez, la gente se puso a escribir con el fin de documentar la situación, de consolar y entretener, 3 pero también para mejor gestionar las propias experiencias traumáticas que resultaban de la pandemia. 4 Sin embargo, debido al actual paisaje mediático, la repercusión de la situación experimentada como excepcional-hubo siempre epidemias, enfermedades
Die Labor-Metapher ist in den Digital Humanities (DH) weit verbreitet und wird aktuell verstärkt ... more Die Labor-Metapher ist in den Digital Humanities (DH) weit verbreitet und wird aktuell verstärkt im Kontext der wissenschaftssoziologischen ›laboratory studies‹ auf vielfältige Weise diskutiert. Häufig betonen DH-Labore dabei den Aspekt des wissenschaftlichen Austauschs und der Kollaboration, der in den interdisziplinären Konstellationen der DH geradezu genre-prägend ist. Darüber hinaus ist das Labor traditionell eng verknüpft mit der Funktion als Experimentierstätte. In DH-Labs werden dementsprechend geistes- und kulturwissenschaftliche Daten in Experimentalsettings aufbereitet, transformiert, kodiert und mithilfe von speziellen Instrumenten und Verfahren – also digitalen Tools und Methoden – analysiert. Die regelmäßige Reflexion des wechselseitigen Einflusses von digitalen Methoden und bestehenden Theorien sowie auch Epistemen eröffnet im DH-Lab zusätzlich die Möglichkeit erkenntnistheoretischer Versuche. Dabei fungieren DH-Labs auch als dynamische Werkstätten des Wissens. Grundle...
Die journalistische Gattung der "Spectators" des 18. Jahrhunderts stellt ein wichtiges ... more Die journalistische Gattung der "Spectators" des 18. Jahrhunderts stellt ein wichtiges Weltkulturerbe aus der Zeit der Aufklärung dar. Die Zeitschriften entsprachen dem demokratischen Ideal, kulturelle und moralische Fragen in nicht-akademischen Kreisen zu verbreiten und Werte der Aufklärung wie Weltoffenheit, Toleranz, intellektuelle Kritik, Selbstreflexion und soziale Verantwortung zu popularisieren. Basierend auf dem bestehenden Textkorpus der digitalen Edition der Spectators (https://gams.uni-graz.at/spectators) zielt diese Kooperation zwischen dem Institute for Interactive Systems and Data Science der Technischen Universität Graz, des Know-Center Graz sowie dem ZIM-ACDH und dem Institut für Romanistik der Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz darauf ab, dieses mehrsprachige Korpus mit computergestützten Methoden der quantitativen Textanalyse zu untersuchen. Damit sollen Erkenntnisse über die Verschiebung von Themen über Zeiträume und geografische Entfernung hinweg, sowie übe...
Presentation at the virtual dha go!es digital Day presenting the current state of the project &qu... more Presentation at the virtual dha go!es digital Day presenting the current state of the project "Distant Spectators: Distant Reading for periodicals of the Enlightenment" funded by the Austrian Academy of Sciences' go!digital next generation funding scheme. The main objective of <em>Distant Spectators</em> is how (and which) quantitative methods (topic modeling, stylometry, sentiment analysis and network analysis) prove useful and efficient for the analysis of a multilingual text corpus from the 18th century, which currently incorporates discourses in six languages (French, Italian, Spanish, English, German, and Portuguese) with a total of approximately 4000 individual texts with more than 9 million tokens. In particular, the quantitative analysis of the Spectators aims to enhance and improve the studies on the transnational transfer and development of this literary genre based on the English prototypes <em>The Tatler</em> (1709–1711), <em>T...
El Argonauta español, 2021
The poster presents the idea behind and first steps in the recently started project Distant Spect... more The poster presents the idea behind and first steps in the recently started project Distant Spectators. The objective of this project is the application of distant reading and text-mining methods (topic modeling, meme diffusion, stylometry, sentiment analysis, network analysis) to the Spectators press, a journalistic genre of the 18th century Enlightenment, and the combination of these methods with the existing expertise gained from close reading. This will provide an insight into the formation of trans-European ideas, literary techniques and cultural practices by employing quantitative methods to investigate authorship attribution, editorial networks, distribution of topics, transfer of micro-narratives etc. The project builds on an existing and ongoing digital edition project which has been running since 2008 (https://gams.uni-graz.at/spectators). Currently it incorporates approximately 4000 individual texts in six languages (French, Italian, Spanish, English, German, Portuguese) ...
Applied Network Science, 2020
Spectator periodicals contributed to spreading the ideas of the Age of Enlightenment, a turning p... more Spectator periodicals contributed to spreading the ideas of the Age of Enlightenment, a turning point in human history and the foundation of our modern societies. In this work, we study the spirit and atmosphere captured in the spectator periodicals about important social issues from the 18thcentury by analyzing text sentiment of those periodicals. Specifically, based on a manually annotated corpus of over 3 700 issues published in five different languages and over a period of more than one hundred years, we conduct a three-fold sentiment analysis: First, we analyze the development of sentiment over time as well as the influence of topics and narrative forms on sentiment. Second, we construct sentiment networks to assess the polarity of perceptions between different entities, including periodicals, places and people. Third, we construct and analyze sentiment word networks to determine topological differences between words with positive and negative polarity allowing us to make concl...
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Papers by Elisabeth Hobisch