Article Published on Urban Transport in Latvian Novels
An article by Eva Eglāja-Kristsone, Director and Lead Researcher at Institute of Literature, Folklore and Art of the University of Latvia, has been published in the prestigious digital literary studies journal Journal of Computational Literary Studies. The article, titled “Urban Transportation in Latvian Novels or Why Do You Use a 19th-Century Horse-drawn Cab When You Have a 20th-Century Taxi?”, was co-authored with researchers Anda Baklāne and Valdis Saulespurēns from the National Library of Latvia.
Exploring how processes of modernization are reflected in Latvian novels at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, the article highlights the transition from horse-drawn transport to mechanized vehicles and analyzes how these changes influenced everyday life, lifestyles, and value systems in literary texts.
The study draws on the largest digital corpus of literary texts created in Latvia to date — the Corpus of Early Latvian Novels (1879–1940), which contains approximately 460 works. The article also demonstrates an innovative methodology in the digital humanities: large language models were used to identify modes of transportation in literary texts.
The research was conducted within the framework of the national research programme Digital Humanities project “Development of an Open and FAIR-Compliant Digital Humanities Ecosystem in Latvia” (No. VPP-IZM-DH-2022/1-0002), with support from the Latvian Council of Science.