Multiple Distortion Effects of Digital Literary Historiography? The (Again) Forgotten Literary Work of Louise Otto

This article explores the epistemological and methodological implications of digital literary historiography in the light of incomplete digital archives and evolving digital research practices. It proposes a set of best practices for an epistemology suited to digital literary historiography. The primary objective is to analyze the semantic patterns in forgotten texts by women through a mixed methods approach. Using the example of Louise Otto’s Die Lehnspflichtigen as a case study, the article examines the various factors that contributed to a de-canonization of women’s literature in the context of the Vormärz revolution. The interdisciplinary approach combines quantitative and qualitative methods, particularly NLP techniques with hermeneutic interpretation, to identify semantic patterns based on linguistic occurrences. The NLP-based analyses revealed notable distinctions in the use of negation and keyword frequency. The fundamental condition for effective heuristics is the continuous adaptation of precise and unambiguous filtering rules, evaluated through expert feedback loops. Objectives: The primary objective is to analyze the semantic patterns in these forgotten texts by women through a mixed methods approach. Using the example of Louise Otto’s village narrative  Die Lehnspflichtigen as a case study, the article examines the various and complex factors that contributed to a de-canonization of women’s literature in the context of the Vormärz revolution. Methodology: The interdisciplinary approach combines quantitative and qualitative methods of literary analysis, particularly natural language processing (NLP) techniques with hermeneutic interpretation, to identify semantic patterns based on linguistic occurrences. Results: While no stylistic differences were detected between canonized and de-canonized women’s literature using stylometric analysis with (stylo), the NLP-based analyses revealed notable distinctions in the use of negation and keyword frequency. These preliminary results require further validation with larger corpora. Conclusion: Negations in Die Lehnspflichtigen represent the rejection of social order rather than of gender roles. A higher frequency of modal auxiliary verbs in both Otto’s literary village narrative and her political essay Die Freiheit ist unteilbar reflects political demands – such as the call for human and women’s rights – articulated in the Frauen-Zeitung. The fundamental condition for effective heuristics in the detection of linguistic patterns is the continuous adaptation of precise and unambiguous filtering rules, evaluated through interdisciplinary collaboration and expert feedback loops.