Work

Making BERT Feel at Home. Modelling Domestic Space in 19th-Century British and Irish Fiction

Year: 2025

Type: article

Abstract: We introduce a novel approach to detecting domestic space in literary texts beyond explicit spatial markers like “home” or “house.” Using a pre-trained English BERT model fine-tuned on manually annotated passages from a corpus of 19th-century British and Irish novels, we develop a method to operationalize and quantify domesticity in fiction. Our model captures the nuances of domestic space by analyzing contextual and relational cues rather than relying solely on toponymic and other explicit references. This approach offers new insights into the representation of space in literature, revealing the fluid and dynamic nature of domesticity in 19th-century British and Irish fiction.

Source: DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals)

DOI: 10.48694/jcls.4164

Authors: Svenja Guhr, Jessica Monaco, Alexander Sherman, Matthew Warner, Mark Algee-Hewitt

Institutions: University of California, Berkeley, Stanford University, The University of Texas at Austin

Language: English

Topic: Digital Humanities and Scholarship

Subfield: Literature and Literary Theory

Field: Arts and Humanities

Domain: Social Sciences

Open Access status: diamond

OpenAlex ID: W7083624756

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