Keywords: digital heritage collections, literary history, hypertext, computational literary studies, corpus linguistics<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The aim of my paper is to discuss the usage of cultural heritage collections in the context of the explosive growth of digital cultural heritage and text resources. What kind of experiences and challenges do we have from the literary studies perspective?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The primary question is how to bridge the gap between the research possibilities offered by the contemporary LT&TDM and the increasing resources of texts and other digital data, produced by memory institutions. This has proved to be a complicated task and international practice has shown that literary scholars are slower to embrace new practices than linguists for whom corpus-based research is already a professional standard. In general, literary scholars are more used to working with traditional methods, analysing them as undivided poetical and semantic entities (Schriebman et al).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The Estonian Literary Museum has since the 1990s been one of the pioneering institutions in the field of literary studies and folkloristics in our country. We were applying DH tools in creating of the content based interactive information systems and scientific databases. The aim of my paper is to argue the research challenges of literature based on cultural heritage sources using DH methods and computing technology.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The most general question we have asked is whether Digital Humanities can essentially be considered as a tool or a method for literary research, or is it an entirely new approach in literary studies, having a potential to change literary theory significantly. (Viires, Laak 2018) This question is particularly relevant when we talk about electronic literature, multimedia poetry and other interactive literary forms that cannot be considered as \u201ctraditional humanities research objects\u201d any more and can exist only in the digital environment. Although the field of Digital Humanities is broad, the meaning of DH is often reduced to methods of computational language-centered analyses, mainly based on using different tools and software languages (R, Python, network analysis, topic modelling etc.).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
During the past twenty years, my research has mainly been focussed on developing large-scale implementation projects for digital representation of Estonian literary history. The objective of these experimental projects has been to develop principally new non-linear models of literary history for the digital environment (similar to the pioneering \u201cWomen Writers Project\u201d at the Brown university).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
We started with the first content-based project of literary history titled \u201cERNI. Estonian Literary History in Texts 1924-1925\u201d at the Estonian Literary Museum in 1997 (www2.kirmus.ee\/erni). Its objective was to use a relatively limited amount of well-studied source texts focussing on the intertextual relations of literary reviews and works of literature in the 1920s. A new digital model of literary history was presented in the form of an interactive hypertextual network of texts, based on literary source texts, reviews and discussions. The challenge was to remediate the printed book format of literary history into digital text models. (Bolter, Grusin 1999) We re-conceptualised literary history as a system, and the non-linear narrative as a gallery with many entrances. ERNI was one of the first successful Tiger Leap projects in Estonia. Our main task was to ensure its usability in the field of education. We cooperated with school teachers in developing this project and added a significant number of study materials and a questionnaire.<\/p>\n\n\n\n