TextEnt

Literary narratives are rooted in imaginations localized in space and time. According to discoveries, fashions and tastes, writers speak of different places: Ancient Rome, Golden Age Spain, Romantic Germany and so on. Place names define a constantly shifting “geographical horizon” of literature. However, places have not only geographical coordinates, but also diachronic ones. In other words, it’s not enough to know that it’s a place: you also need to know what period it’s set in to better understand the meaning of the text. Maps can be useful for illustrating certain aspects of this data, but they are not without their limitations. To overcome these limitations, the project will develop an Atlas informatique de la littérature francophone, i.e. a reusable analytical framework for studying and representing the dynamics of the geographical horizon in literature. By building a pipeline for the extraction, disambiguation, validation and projection of textual toponyms, it is possible to study the geography of literature on a large scale, discovering how authors have used place names over time, and thus how their worldview has evolved and how they have reshaped their past.