Undertaking a distant reading of exclamation marks in the digitized and annotated N.F.S. Grundtvig data, this paper targets a trait of an overall romanticist, emotionalizing trend in a corpus of 19th century literature: It proposes to analyze the use of exclamation marks as a deposition of heightened attention to emotional experience and intention in printed matter and typesetting in the writings of the Danish poet, priest and politician N.F.S. Grundtvig (1783-1872), who is widely regarded as the central figure in the 19th century Danish religious development and cultural nation building process. By way of Topic Modeling (Latent Dirichlet Allocation) this paper sketches the temporal as well as semantic contexts of the exclamation marks.
Less is more. This is the ‘methodo-logic’ undergirding this study. Using Ockham’s
razor on methodological considerations, we have sought to trim our research design. That
is: in this paper we want to demonstrate how a relatively simple set-up, in terms of
computational capacity, can tweak out valuable information and answer
hermeneutically complex research questions at a domain-specific level – in this case within the
study of N.F.S. Grundtvig (1783-1872), emotional history and 19th century typesetting.
Using the relatively commonplace procedure of Topic Modeling (Latent Dirichlet
Allocation), the contribution of this study is, in terms of content, found in the field of
Grundtvig scholarship. But, in terms of methodological meta-reflections, it targets any
computational humanist seeking to calibrate subject matter with material objects and
procedures.
The 19th century is oftentimes presented as the entry into modernity: A period in which
fundamental political and psychological phenomena, dominating the world today, were
established. Among these phenomena were the cultivation and secularization of the
private emotional experience [
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Handbooks on Romanticism thus hold entries with suggestive titles such as ‘The
Subjective Turn’; anthologies on the matter are rich with chapters on ‘emotionalization’
[
Building on and expanding our paper “Emotional Imprints: Letter Spacing in N.F.S.
Grundtvig’s Writings” [
Grundtvig was deeply (though complexly) indebted to the romantic movements [
In scholarly literature it is widely acknowledged that Grundtvig sought to stimulate the
process of assembling a Danish collective-emotional consciousness based on 1) a
horizontal-contemporary axis incorporating the different strata within the socially
heterogeneous “Folk” [
Today Grundtvig is celebrated for his efforts: “N.F.S. Grundtvig founded Danish democracy”; “N.F.S. Grundtvig established the Church of Denmark (folkekirken)”; “N.F.S. Grundtvig is the founder of the Danish school system”; “N.F.S. Grundtvig revived the pre-Christian Nordic tradition”; “N.F.S. Grundtvig is the most important writer of Christian hymns in Denmark”. These are surprisingly recurrent statements in Danish public media deeming his intellectual activity more culturally important than the work of his world-famous contemporaries Søren A. Kierkegaard (1813-1855) and H.C. Andersen (1805-1875).
One reason for Grundtvig’s continuing relevance, measured in current political and
cultural media attention, seems to have been the introduction of emotional categories
to domains where they hitherto had been irrelevant: A) In the relationship between the
individual and the Danish people, Grundtvig encouraged individuals to feel part of the
collective national entity, Denmark [
However, of late, historian J.F. Møller has convincingly argued the case, that the
Grundtvig legacy and reception history distorts specific core features of the Grundtvig
writings – not least pertaining to Grundtvig’s skepticism towards democracy [
Grundtvig was a polyglot and polymath, who wrote on a variety of different subjects. Therefore, the Grundtvig dataset is enormously varied in terms of genre and content. It covers books, essays and poems on Danish history, Nordic mythology and Church history, political and philosophical texts, as well as linguistic studies of Old Icelandic and Old English. In the general public, however, he is better known for his hymns, of which he wrote close to 1,600.
In toto the Grundtvig corpus comprises 37.000 pages, published from 1804 to 1872: This material has been OCR prepared and is being furnished with XML markup by the staff of the Grundtvig Study Centre, Aarhus University. As a part of this process, the bulk of the collected writings born in the blackletter typeface Fraktur has been transformed into the Roman typeface Antiqua, more familiar to a modern audience. The exclamation mark, however, is an unproblematic constant in both typefaces. 3.2
The origin of the punctus exclamativus or punctus admirativus in western punctuation
history is blurred. Tentative consensus seems to be that humanists and so-called
‘dictaminists’ in the early renaissance milieu sought to revive oratorical ideals imbued in
the concept of writing in Antiquity [
We wish to establish 1) whether N.F.S. Grundtvig’s use of exclamation marks changes significantly over time. Assuming that exclamation marks can be taken as Grundtvig’s signals of heightened attention, we furthermore wish to profile and determine 2) the semantic topics most likely clinging to or calling for exclamation marks in his writings. This exploration is taken as a proxy for an emotional indication of the (intended) corecontent in Grundtvig’s writings. 4.1
Grundtvig’s collected writings are available in XML (N = 1073) following the TEI guidelines. Currently 42% are richly annotated, but the process of enriching the data is ongoing. The project’s scheduled completion date is in 2029. The data set has a median document size of four pages and contains 3.968.841 word tokens distributed over 115.240 word-types. The data for the current study are available at: https://github.com/centre-for-humanities-computing/grundtvig-data. The data is available in this format through an agreement with Grundtvig Study Centre. Furthermore, we have developed a custom XML parser available to facilitate third-party data exploration. The parser is available at: https://github.com/centre-for-humanities-computing/GrundtvigParser. 4.2
Weaning in early and late publications, the distribution of exclamation marks in Grundtvig’s writings falls in 5-6 temporal ‘islands’ of 1,000-2,000 marks published pro anno (Figure 2). Certain years stand out: In 1815, 1818, 1827 the level rises to 4,0005,000 pro anno (Figure 2); 1837, however, holds the most impressive spike: Just above 7,000 marks in one year alone (Figure 2).
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Figure 1. Distribution of Grundtvig’s Published Writings
Figure 2. Distribution of Exclamation Marks in Grundtvig’s Published Writings
Figure 3. Distribution of Exclamation Marks in Grundtvig’s Writings Relative to Publications
Though no significant co-relation between publishing house and the quantum of
exclamation marks in Grundtvig’s writings has been detected [cf. 5], a brief stop to pick up
a couple of points on publishing ‘management’ of exclamation marks within two
particular publications is relevant at this stage. The 1838 In Living Memory (Mands Minde)
lectures were published posthumously in 1877 by N.F.S.’s son Svend Grundtvig
(18241883). In our material we have categorized it a 1838 product. It is, however, well known
that Svend Grundtvig censured and adjusted the orthography and punctuation of his
father leaving out letter-spacings and exclamation marks that were part of the original
manuscript [
Yet a relevant if curious and minor detail: In the 1807 essay “On Religion and
Liturgy” (“Om Religion og Liturgie”) the editor leaves critical voice-over-like comments
in footnotes and parentheses in the body of the text containing three exclamation marks
(!!!). It seems to be a strategy akin to the editorial textual meta-comment ‘sic’/‘sic!’
(short for ‘sic erat scriptum’) originally assuring readers that nothing has been distorted
in transcription or in the typesetting process. In this instance the editor, however,
unorthodoxly uses the exclamation marks to signal his bafflement over and skepticism
towards the line of young Grundtvig’s arguments [
The corpus was split into sentences; sentences that ended in exclamation marks were extracted for further analysis. In order to create larger document sizes, the sentences were concatenated into groups of three exclamation sentences. These merged sentences were passed through a pre-processing pipeline consisting of removal of whitespace, punctuation, numbers (excluding 4-digit numbers; in order to maintain numbers representing years). The sentences were subsequently lowercased, lemmatized and tokenized.
The tokenized inputs were stripped of words carrying low semantic weight, i.e.
stopwords, and were further filtered so that each document only contained words present in
at least five other documents, but in no more than half the total document count. These
steps attempt to ensure that only semantically weighty words appear in our topic model.
Twenty Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) [
The term most likely to occur in the vicinity of an exclamation mark is: ‘God’ (‘Gud’). The overall term frequency in the exclamation corpus is just below 8,000. First runner up is: ‘Lord’ (‘Herre’) with an overall term frequency just below 5,000. ‘Death’ (‘Død’) is second runner up with approximately 3,000; ‘Vel’ – a Danish equivalent to the English ‘Well’ connoting something explicitly benign as well as something additional, a surplus of a sort – comes in fourth with close to 2,500 occurrences. ‘Danish’ (‘Dansk’), ‘the North’(‘Norden’), ‘Denmark’ (‘Danmark’) are also represented. In other words: As is evident from the top-30 list (Figure 6) on the one hand a Christoreligious and on the other a national-ethnic cluster seem to be at play. This dual picture is relatively clear; and in being so, it differs slightly from the more thematically diffuse image arising of the full Grundtvig corpus (Figure 7).
Translation top-to-bottom: danish, god, human, the north, truth, lord, denmark, faith, people, son, saw, earth, old, king, got/few, wild, sword, christian, could, got/few, death, oath, just, christian, light, see, well, christ’, should, cloud/shy. Translation top-to-bottom: king, do, denmark, boat, truth, land, case, human, church, und (German), do, die (German), kingdom/rich, get, put, walk/go, son, far, real, law, living, certain, history, the north, site/page, nevertheless, seem, first, thing,mouth. Topic 4 and 5 are relatively clearly oriented towards national-ethnic topics; where topic 4 tends to deal with the Danish experience of life and its conditions, topic 5 is slightly more oriented towards the past and towards the rest of Scandinavia: the North.
Translation top-to-bottom: Danish, people, Denmark, well, could, just, give, wild, find, right/straight, do, old, god, speak/speech, may, go, honor, get, land/kingdom, win, heart, spirit, word, hand, let, stand, day, life, could, side. Perhaps surprisingly topic 4 does not seem to be nested in a belligerent, anti-German discourse. Instead the relatively high number of verbs within this cluster might be said to reflect a Protestant work ethic – the concept famously coined by German sociologist of religion Max Weber in the early 1900s [cf. 25]. In any case Grundtvig was part of a broad 19th century, romantic tendency to idealize peasants and the peasantry – and to rank hard physical outdoor labor over the lifestyle of a clerk spend reading and writing indoors. A kind of manifest the 1839 poem and song “A common and merry vigorous Life on Earth” (“Et jaevnt og muntert virksomt Liv paa Jord”) sums up this mentality – one that seems to have left its imprint on the verbs in the word list of topic 4, we suggest. Translation top-to-bottom: the north, old, go, people, get, denmark, danish, wild, go, well, king, get, time, long, giant, saw, Odin, could, beacon, should, saga, king, honor, stand, let, happiness/fate, dare, year, many, day.
Figure 9. Topic 5: The North Topic 5 is preoccupied with the ‘old’ pre-Christian Nordic past of ‘Denmark’ and the Danish ‘people’; ‘many’ ‘days’ and ‘years’ of roaming ‘giants’ and a reigning ‘Odin’; a past mediated by ‘Saga’, the demi-goddess personification of Nordic history and an important agent in a variety of Grundtvig’s writings such as the somewhat autobiographical New Year’s Morning (Nyaars-Morgen) written in 1824. 4.5
Even though topic 1, 2, and 3 all seem to be carriers of Christian discourse, a division of labour is detectable in the finer nuances of the individual word lists. In fact, it seems that topic 1 tends to deal with ‘lived religion’ and church life (Figure 11); topic 2 gravitates towards ontological matters – the composition of the universe and the concept of time (Figure 12); topic 3 more vaguely seems to hold elements dedicated on the one hand to ‘mystical’ experience and on the other to Old Testament narratives (Figure 13). Translation top-to-bottom: god, lord, faith, word, truth, world, human, spirit, life, alive, faith, should, do, church, let, children, call, could, wild, christ’s, death/dead, light, speak/speech, well, love, give, christ-like/christian, spiritual, may. Translation top-to-bottom: god, death/dead, life, word, heart, lord, sky, light, earth, day, spirit, grave, let, joy, singing/song, the earth, eternal, peace, cloud/sky, name, give, world, wave, voice, go, sea, son, soul, honor, high. Translation top-to-bottom: god, lord, saw, see, son, king, oath, well, sword, do, land/country, world, name, spirit, receive, let, give, gold, people, rock, hold, could, blood, pray, get, word, life, giant, bear/yield, fall.
Figure 13. Topic 4: Mysticism and Old Testament
What arises from these five topics is a semantic profile more akin to the one found in Grundtvig’s poetic writings in hymns and songs than to the sum of his writings – to his prose. Building on the plot of the distribution of Grundtvig’s exclamation marks (Figure 2) and noticing the uncontested peak in 1837 – the publication year of Grundtvig’s song and hymn compilation Glockenspiel for the Danish Church (Sang-Vaerk til den Danske Kirke) containing 401 individual texts – we thus suggest that Grundtvig’s exclamation marks are overrepresented in hymns and songs. Certain features of the five topics found within the Grundtvig exclamation sub-corpus corroborate this, a main one being the conspicuous lack of an anti-German agenda in topic 4 concerned with things Danish – a topic otherwise often drawing in negative reflections of the neighboring country in Grundtvig’s prose [cf. 5]. On this basis we propose that what we see in Grundtvig’s deployment of exclamation marks is a continuation of a religious exclamation usage in material supporting Christian worship (‘lovsang’) suchs as hymns. In other words: He draws mainly on the ‘venerational’ aspects of the exclamation mark imbued in its former title punctus admirativus. This at least explains the over-all ‘positive’ bend of the semantic clusters oriented towards the Christo-religious sphere (1,2,3) and the nationalethnic sphere (4,5) respectively.
An additional closing remark: The clear-cut topical division – into a
Christo-religious cluster and a national-ethnic one – is in itself worth highlighting: as was the case
for our latter-spacing study [