Body images digital: strategies for the identification of literary character descriptions

Presentation by Folke Gernert, Ulrich Port,  Maria Hinzmann, and Christof Schöch at the 37th Romanistentag in Augsburg “Europe between Regionalism and Globalization” (October 4-7, 2021) in the section “European Aesthetics(s). Body Images in Art and Literature between European Canon and Regional Heterodoxies (13th-17th Century)”.

This contribution is part of a project on 'physiognomic character descriptions' in the French and German novels of the 18th and 19th centuries, which is being developed in cooperation between German Studies (Ulrich Port), Romance Studies (Folke Gernert) and Digital Humanities (Christof Schöch, Maria Hinzmann) out of the Trier collaborative project MiMoText. In a workshop report, the presentation provides insights into the current status and builds a bridge between qualitative readings (Balzac/Lavater), the construction of relevant vocabularies (body representations/physiognomy), and the methodological approach of the 'Description Detector' - a program that enables the identification and of character description passages based on the vocabularies. The paper aims to present the methodological approaches using examples from the French corpus and, in dialogue with literary scholars, to explore which research questions on literary body representation might be productive for further development.