Automated compositional change detection in Saxo Grammaticus’ Gesta Danorum

Kristoffer L. Nielbo*, Mads L. Perner, Christian Larsen, Jonas Nielsen, Ditte Laursen

*Corresponding author for this work

    Research output: Contribution to journalConference articleResearchpeer-review

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    Abstract

    Saxo Grammaticus’ medieval source Gesta Danorum (“Deeds of the Danes”) represents the beginning of the modern historical research in Denmark. The bipartite composition of Gesta Danorum has however been subject to much academic debate. In particular the nature and location of a transition between early Pre-Christian and late Christian content have given rise to two competing accounts. In this paper, we argue that the debate can be represented as a problem of intratextual dynamics and we combine models from Information Retrieval and Natural Language Processing with techniques for time series analysis in order to reevaluate the debate. Results indicate that the transition is gradual, starting in book eight and ending in book ten, but that a point-like interpretation is possible in book nine. We argue that the approach exemplifies scalable“automated close reading”, which has multiple applications in text-based historical research.


    Change Detection, Cultural Heritage, Medieval Literature, Text Analysis, Topic Modeling

    Original languageEnglish
    JournalCEUR Workshop Proceedings
    Volume2364
    Pages (from-to)321-332
    ISSN1613-0073
    Publication statusPublished - 2019
    Event4th Conference on Digital Humanities in the Nordic Countries, DHN 2019 - Copenhagen, Denmark
    Duration: 5. Mar 20198. Mar 2019

    Conference

    Conference4th Conference on Digital Humanities in the Nordic Countries, DHN 2019
    Country/TerritoryDenmark
    CityCopenhagen
    Period05/03/201908/03/2019

    Keywords

    • Cultural heritage
    • Medieval literature
    • Text analysis
    • Topic modeling
    • — Change detection

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