Conference Agenda
Overview and details of the sessions of this conference. Please select a date or location to show only sessions at that day or location. Please select a single session for detailed view (with abstracts and downloads if available).
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Daily Overview |
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Mittwoch, 1:5: Mittwoch, 1:5 – Digital Soundscapes Location: Hörsaal 5 lecture hall Session Chair: Peter Stadler, Universität Paderborn | |
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Soundful Dickens 1: School of Information, UC Berkeley; 2: FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg This paper explores the computational analysis of sound in English-language literary fiction, building on Guhr’s (2026) operationalisation of fictional sound events as sound-word-bearing verbal phrases annotated with loudness levels. Originally developed for German prose, the method is adapted here to 19th-century British fiction, using the Dickens Novel Corpus (DNov) as a case study. Rather than relying exclusively on manual annotation, German-language training texts were automatically translated into English using the DeepL API, preserving XML-based annotation spans. These, combined with a single manually annotated English text, were used to fine-tune a pre-trained English BERT model. The results show a surprisingly strong performance compared to similar adaptations in other genres of the same target language. The paper discusses the benefits of using translated annotations and examines sound-related patterns across Dickens's novels using a scalable reading approach to DNov. | |