We investigated the semantic and rhetoric imagery of Kafka’s novel The Trial through three illustrated editions of the text. Using image analysis techniques and examining the relationship between images and corresponding texts, we found these illustrations more closely associated with sentences than chapters and uncovered their artistic and hermeneutic nuances.

This ongoing project provides a novel workflow for studying Weimar Germany’s political culture. By integrating text-hermeneutic investigation with quantitative digital analysis techniques, it enables new insights into historical newspaper discourses on democracy. The project, therefore, enhances historical newspaper research and contributes to the understanding of interwar Germany.

We hypothesize narrative volatility (shifts in sentiment between chunks of text) has an effect on appreciation and thus on ratings of fiction. We describe how we compute volatility and show its distribution over genre. We explain how we will use the result to test the hypothesis.

We analyze how often Indian English and German novels (2000–2024) refer to information technologies (IT), reflecting demographic, cultural, and societal differences. We use a word-list approach and and a large language model. The llm-based approach works well, but the result doesn't confirm our hypothesis that there is a significant difference.

This paper showcases layout analysis and OCR to make an under-researched, 120 year old crime journal accessible. It then uses a variety of text analysis tools for distant reading, exploring how crime was addressed at the time.