»textklang« – Towards a Multi-Modal Exploration Platform for German Poetry

Proceedings of the 13th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2022), pages 5345–5355 Marseille, 20-25 June 2022 © European Language Resources Association (ELRA), licensed under CC-BY-NC-4.0 5345 »textklang« – Towards a Multi-Modal Exploration Platform for German Poetry Nadja Schauffler∗, Toni Bernhart†, André Blessing∗, Gunilla Eschenbach‡, Markus Gärtner∗, Kerstin Jung∗, Anna Kinder‡, Julia Koch∗, Sandra Richter‡,†, Gabriel Viehhauser†, Thang Vu∗, Lorenz Wesemann‡, Jonas Kuhn∗ ∗Institute for Natural Language Processing, University of Stuttgart, Germany {firstname.lastname}@ims.uni-stuttgart.de †Institute of Literary Studies University of Stuttgart, Germany {firstname.lastname}@ilw.uni-stuttgart.de ‡German Literature Archive Marbach, Germany {firstname.lastname}@dla-marbach.de Abstract We present the steps taken towards an exploration platform for a multi-modal corpus of German lyric poetry from the Romantic era developed in the project »textklang«. This interdisciplinary project develops a mixed-methods approach for systematic investigations of the relationship between written text (here lyric poetry) and its potential and actual sonic realisation (in recitations and musical performances). The multi-modal »textklang« platform will be designed to technically and analytically combine three modalities: the poetic text, the audio signal of a recorded recitation and, at a later stage, music scores of a musical setting of a poem. The methodological workflow will enable scholars to develop hypotheses about the relationship between textual form and sonic/prosodic realisation based on theoretical considerations, text interpretation and evidence from recorded recitations. The full workflow will support hypothesis testing either through systematic corpus analysis alone or with additional contrastive perception experiments. For the experimental track, researchers will be enabled to manipulate prosodic parameters in (re-)synthesised variants of the original recordings. The focus of this paper is on the design of the base corpus and on tools for systematic exploration – placing special emphasis on our response to challenges stemming from multi-modality and the methodologically diverse interdisciplinary setup. Keywords: Digital Humanities, Literary studies, Lyric poetry, Corpus exploration platform, Speech resource, Prosody 1. Introduction In this paper we present the creation of a multi-modal platform for research on literature recitations which is being developed within the »textklang« project. »text- klang« is an interdisciplinary endeavour targeting the interplay of text and sound in lyric poetry. It has set out to combine methods and disciplinary practices from literary studies, digital humanities/computational linguistics and linguistics/laboratory phonology. The core of the project’s corpus is based on German poetry from the Romantic era (approximately 1795–1835) and comprises a collection of recordings of lyric poetry recitations and vocal performances of songs setting Ro- mantic poetry to music. In the course of the project, we will develop a methodological toolbox to investigate the text and sound dimension in this data by combining prosodic analysis with text-analytical tools from corpus linguistics and computational literary studies. Method- ology and tools, such as an exploration platform, will enable scholars to generate and test hypotheses about systematic patterns in the relationship between textual form, prosodic realisation and aspects of interpreta- tion. In order to evaluate and test hypotheses regarding the interplay of prosodic realisation and interpretation, prosodic details will be manipulated by means of con- trolled (re-)synthesised variants of the original …

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