Discussion of the Approach

The approach of generating assignments of new instances to be included in the ontology tries to avoid the labour-intensive and time-consuming work, i.e. an alternative to the usual manual

6.2 Semi-Automatic Assignment for Instances of the Ontology 81

Figure 6.12: Extract of the result of the uploaded text Melmoth the Wanderer. Each row of the table contains one assignment/ annotated piece of information.

editing of the ontology. It attends users familiar with encoding texts, but who might not necessarily be familiar with ontologies. Furthermore, for users who had already used the client-server system, it might also be an interesting option to check and compare their encoding in both applications.

Unfortunately, the TEI scheme was not developed with focus on literary analysis so that only a few tags are available in the TEI. Therefore, different parts of the TEI standard have been exploited and recombined to achieve an annotation for literary characters. For this reason, the description for literary characters cannot always be generalised, but it was one way to support this kind of application. Thereby, the used keywords for features, actions, etc. cannot be generalised in all cases. But except from this, the semi-automatic assignments can avoid a longer orientation phase with the ontology and can provide an easier access to it.

In addition, by testing this application, it was interesting that if a text is completely encoded, one can receive assignments for more than one character processing the encoded material only once. If representations of several characters are added to the ontology, the analysis of their relations and interactions can be supported more easily.

In summary, one can say that the presented application gives an easy access to an ontology and one can imagine to transfer it to other topics or applications in the humanities. At the current state, it only represents a sketchy application, but its potential already shows interesting aspects for works in the next future.

82 Chapter 6 Manipulation of and Information Retrieval in the Ontology

Part II

Character Analysis – Impacts of the Developed Ontology

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Chapter 7

A Computer-Aided Analysis of Devil Characters in the Faust literature

After the presentation of the developed ontology and applications based on this ontology, in this chapter, a combination of these methods and literary analysis is outlined. Comparisons of literary characters taken from the example corpus will be performed. In contrast to usual literary text analysis here results generated from the client-server system are used to support and guide the analysis. Diagrams based on entries in the ontology were created for each character or single mental representations, respectively. On the basis of these statistics and their visualised formal description (as trees), characters are compared with each other. The mental representation might not always be objective, but by enlarging them with citations of secondary literature, the conclusions are supported.

This procedure, supporting analyses with computer-aided methods, allows the investigation, if analyses can underline the formal description of the characters and vice versa. It should be noted that the formal descriptions were included before analysing and interpreting the characters in detail.

The analyses should give information about literary characters in general as well as specific information about the selected devil characters and their development from the first Faust story until the stories of the 19th century. A time line of these stories and the different genres of these works are depicted in Fig. 7.1. The following analysis criteria will guide the comparisons:

• What are the differences and similarities between characters according to different genres?

• Which similarities are found within the same genres? And which are individual compo-nents used by different authors?

• Are consecutive Faust stories influenced by each other?

• Are there main motifs, which guide the presentation of the devil characters?

• What are the major variations found between devil characters? Which of them are (extreme) variations?

A brief single interpretation of every analysed character is given in the following analysis con-centrating on the above mentioned aspects. To help illustrate the development and variations of devil characters, characters, which are not included in the ontology, but could have influenced

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86 Chapter 7 A Computer-Aided Analysis of Devil Characters in the Faust literature

the development of these devils, are mentioned, too. Citations from the literary texts are given in their original language, which is, except from Marlowe’s drama, German. English transla-tions are available for several texts of the corpus: “Historia von D.Johann Fausten” is available via http://www.perseus.tufts.edu²²⁷, Goethe, Johann Wolfgang: Faust - Part One/ Faust - Part Two. translated by David Luke. Oxford 1998, and Klinger, Friedrich Maximilian:

Faustus: his life, death, and descent into Hell. translated by George Henry Borrow. 1840.

The diagrams given in the next sections are generated from the characters in the ontology.

These figures are taken from the mental representation structures. Up to now, the ontology was composed of mostly single structures for each character entered by a user of the system.

For this reason, an empirical analysis comprising comparisons of mental representations of different readers is not yet possible. Nevertheless, the proposed system supports these options.

By a single example the possibilities will be demonstrated (cf. section 8).

Finally, conclusions based on the analysis and comparison concerning the development of devil characters through centuries and genres is outlined in section 7.3.

7.1 Chronological Comparisons of Different Devil Characters

In this section, devil characters of temporally consecutive works are compared with each other.

A working hypothesis is that these characters fulfil a development over time and it is of inter-est to detect such changes. Furthermore, it will be invinter-estigated if such developments of the characters are reflected in the ontology, i.e. the modelled mental representations.

At first, the prose text “Historia von D.Johann Fausten” is compared with Marlowe’s drama

“The Tragicall History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus”, then, followed by comparisons of Goethe’s two Faust dramas and the Faust novel of Klinger. A comparison of Goethe’s dramas with the works of Lenau and Klinger is also included. The comparisons are supported by diagrams of the occurrences of instances in the class hierarchy modelled in the ontology, which represents the mental representations. In addition, the visualised overviews of the characters and their mental representations of the client-server system are incorporated in the analysis.

By analysing and comparing the characters, their characteristics are grouped, e.g. features and (non)-verbal actions.

7.1.1 Precursors of Devil Characters in the Renaissance Literature - the First