Travels with BERT: Surfacing the intertextuality in Hans Christian Andersen's travel writing and fairy tales through the network lens of large language model‐based topic modeling

• Published in: Orbis litterarum Vol. 79; no. 6; pp. 519 - 562
• Main Authors: Tangherlini, Timothy R., Chen, Ruofei
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Malden Wiley Subscription Services, Inc 01.12.2024
• Subjects: Andersen, Hans Christian (1805-1875); computational literary analysis; Fairy tales; Hans Christian Andersen; Intertextuality; Large language models; networks; search; topic modeling; Travel literature; travel writing
• DOI: 10.1111/oli.12458
• ISSN: 0105-7510

Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tales have garnered the greatest popular and scholarly attention despite the interdependence of works across the broad range of his artistic production. We read Andersen's fairy tales in concert with his travel writing to highlight the intertextual aspects that cross these seemingly distinct genres. We leverage recent advances in large language models (LLM) and network theory to generate representations that facilitate user exploration of these intertextual interdependencies across genres and across time. In the first part of our study, we use BERTopic and an LLM model fine‐tuned for nineteenth‐century Danish literary language to present independent and combined topic models of the two corpuses. This approach supports multi‐scalar analysis of intertextual elements within and across these corpuses, thereby implementing a method for macroscopic reading. In the second part of the study, we develop a series of networked representations of the dependencies between fairy tales, where these dependencies are generated on the basis of the shared intertextual topic space of the fairy tales and the travel writing.