Analyse von Begleittexten am Beispiel von 103 Ethnografien

• Published in: Zeitschrift für digitale Geisteswissenschaften no. 3
• Main Authors: Fabienne Kilchör, Jörg Lehmann
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: German
• Published: Forschungsverbund Marbach Weimar Wolfenbüttel / Verband Digital Humanities im deutschsprachigen Raum e.V 01.07.2016
• Subjects: datenerhebung; ethnografie; literaturwissenschaft; paratext; textanalyse
• ISSN: 2510-1358; 2510-1358
• DOI: 10.17175/2020_003

This study presents and tests a methodology with which the paratexts of a medium-sized text corpus are recorded and analysed. In the first part, the theory is introduced, then the separate methodical steps for the acquisition of the different paratextual and textual signals are explained in detail. Their quantification allows the clustering of the collected data and thus the grouping of the texts under study. A corpus of 103 scientific ethnographies is used as an example to demonstrate the results to which the analysis of paratexts can lead. This shows that ethnographic writing in the 20th century oscillates between a scientific presentation on the one hand, and an autobiographical presentation on the other. The analysis focuses both on the text corpus as a whole and on developments over time, which allows to trace the history of the discipline, that had initially conceived the subject of the researcher passively as a neutral observer. It has more recently been presented as an active personality acting and interacting in a social environment. The final part of the study discusses possibilities for automated data collection and the use of machine learning methods. The potential of paratextual analyses to provide insights into the functional differentiation of conventions of representation is thus outlined.