Keywords: Baltic German, Ossianism, Estonia, collections, literary history, James Macpherson
This paper takes a look at the Baltic German reception of “The Poems of Ossian”. For the Baltic Germans, it seems to have been the most important work of lyrical literature written in English. First, a short summary of Macpherson’s project, its literary innovations and reception in Europe is given, which is followed by an overview of the preserved editions in the cultural historical collections of Estonian research libraries. As Baltic Germans mostly read in German, the greatest focus lies on German editions, but also some French and Italian translations…

Keywords: borrowings, corpus planning, foreign words, changes in word meaning
Since 2019, the Institute of the Estonian Language has been reviewing the information of the Dictionary of Standard Estonian (2018). In that process, some problematic areas have been found. These problems need to be addressed in the EKI Combined Dictionary (2021). Among the problems are recommendations for the correct meaning of 130 words (86 of which are foreign words and 44 are Estonian native words). Our current focus is on how to explain the meanings of foreign words in the general language. We are also working on how to combine descriptive…

Keywords: oral history, ethnology, Soviet tourism, Estonia, everyday culture
The article provides an insight into the inherent diversities and ambiguities of Soviet tourism during 1960s–1980s as revealed in Estonian biographical sources. Research on Soviet tourism has largely relied on archival sources and the press, which shed light mainly on the organization and ideological basis of tourism. Drawing on biographical sources, the article contributes to a more comprehensive understanding of the complex nature of Soviet tourism.
The article focuses on the embodied ways in which Estonian travellers experienced personally significant moments during their trips, treating these moments as meaningful, lived experiences…

Keywords: corpus planning, lexis planning, language change, literary language, paronyms
Sometimes different dictionaries face the user with contradicting information. An example of such contradiction is the treatment of paronyms in Estonian. Traditionally, descriptive and prescriptive dictionaries have been separate sources in Estonia, but the new EKI Combined Dictionary (available in the language portal Sõnaveeb ‘Wordweb’) presents both descriptive and prescriptive information, which may enhance the risk of user confusion. In this article, we analyse five Estonian paronym nests, firstly, providing an overview of their treatment in Estonian dictionaries since the beginning of the 20th century and earlier, and secondly, describing the…

Keywords: Baltic German, Ossianism, Estonia, collections, literary history, James Macpherson
This paper takes a look at the Baltic German reception of “The Poems of Ossian”. For the Baltic Germans, it seems to have been the most important work of lyrical literature written in English. First, a short summary of Macpherson’s project, its literary innovations and reception in Europe is given, which is followed by an overview of the preserved editions in the cultural historical collections of Estonian research libraries. As Baltic Germans mostly read in German, the greatest focus lies on German editions, but also some French and Italian translations…

Keywords: early modern period, disputation, history of universities, book history
Early modern disputation was a phenomenon in its own right, involving both performative and textual aspects. The texts of the disputations were different from modern academic dissertations and articles, while at the same time serving as a kind of model for both. For this reason, they must also be approached as a specific genre that no longer exists today. Disputations are intrinsically linked to the early modern university and its traditions: from the 16th to 18th century, the disputation was the main academic product of universities. It was the basis…

Keywords: early modern occasional poetry, album amicorum, digital collections, Reiner Brockmann, Johann Hornung, Joachim Salemann
The article introduces four 17th-century poems belonging to Estonian literary history, which were discovered at the beginning of 2021 by literary researcher Jaak Urmet in the course of a systematic study of the hitherto digitized prints and manuscripts in the libraries and archives of Germany, Latvia, Denmark and some other nearby countries. Two of the four are authored by Reiner Brockmann: a nuptial poem in Latin, published in Germany in 1632, and a congratulatory poem in German, published in 1654 as dedicated to Georg Mancelius,…

Stichwörter: Geschichte, Technik und Forschung, digitale Wende, Baltische Klimageschichte, Datenbank, Presse
In einigen Forschungsbereichen der estnischen Geschichtswissenschaft wie etwa der Agrargeschichte hielten digitale Methoden und Techniken bereits in den 1970er Jahren ihren Einzug. Dies gilt auch für die Klimageschichte, die sich in dieser Zeit wie im übrigen Europa im Übergangsgebiet zwischen Geographie und Geschichtswissenschaft entwickelte. Anhand eines der größten Sturmereignisse des Baltikums, dem Mai-Sturm von 1872, gibt der Artikel einen Überblick über die Phasen der digitalen Wende, die langjährige internationale Zusammenarbeit und die interdisziplinären Forschungsmöglichkeiten der baltischen Klimageschichte. Grosse Datenmengen, die für die Rekonstruktion und Bewertung des historisches Klimas notwendig sind,…

Keywords: anthroponymics, surnames, Estonian history, name changes, national ­campaigns
Surname changes have taken place throughout their existence, but not so often as a result of a nationwide campaign. In Estonia campaign of Estonianizing foreign (mostly German) sounding names took place in 1920–1944 with 99% of the name changes taking place in 1935–1940. It stands out for its intenseness which resulted a surname change of every sixth person. Also, public access to the complete database of name changes already since the 1990s (www.ra.ee/apps/onomastika/) is unique when compared to other countries. Author of this article has amended the public version of the database…

Keywords: dialects, language variation, multivariate analysis, corpus linguistics, ­negation, Võru, Seto
The article exemplifies contemporary language variation studies by examining the variation in the position of the negation word in the Võru and Seto varieties of South Estonian. Using frequency analysis of dialect corpus data, it is shown that despite being close both geographically and linguistically, Seto and Võru exhibit opposite tendencies with regard to their preferences towards pre- and postverbal negation. Võru speakers predominantly use preverbal negation patterns, showing more variation only in two southwestern parishes – Rõuge and Vastseliina. Seto, in turn, prefers the typologically rare postverbal negation construction,…

Keywords: e-lexicography, corpora, dictionary writing system, language portal, data model, API
The article aims to describe some major changes that have taken place in e-lexicography in recent decades in Europe generally and in Estonia in particular. Digital changes have permeated not only the dictionary compilation process but also whole workflow from lexicographic content creation to publication. The focus has shifted from building specific dictionaries to building a central database and infrastructure that can be adapted for further user and NLP applications.
We describe methods and technologies used to better integrate lexicographic data (several tools have been developed within the Horizon 2020…

Keywords: semiotics of culture, reading comprehension, digital culture
The paper focuses on the problems of reading and teaching literature in the context of digitalization and offers solutions for facilitating a meaningful dialogue with cultural heritage. Both divergence and convergence of media pose a challenge to the conventional ways of teaching literature based on source texts, as both processes entail diversification of media channels and dispersion of content across them. Reading in the digital age is characterized by an increasing multimodality, variability and fragmentariness of texts. The best practices of digital learning platforms allow synthesizing heterogeneous versions of the original into a…

Keywords: digital humanities, distant reading, quotations, literary style, formalism
This paper aims to take advantage of modern digital methods to address research topics that, until now, have mostly been subjects of assumption and interpretation based on rather few examples.
More specifically, the purpose of this article is to explore some usage patterns of open quotation as a literary device and its impact on meaning. Open quotation, as defined by the French philosopher François Recanati, is a type of quotation where a string of words in an utterance is marked with quotation marks to imply the presence of multiple or deformed meanings.
Alongside with…

Keywords: stylometry, computational text analysis, authorship attribution, Estonian fiction
The recent rapid expansion of computational methods and tools into humanities have rekindled the conversation surrounding the relationship between a study object and its mathematical representation, or model. The paper serves as a conceptual introduction to stylometry, a sub-field of computational text analysis that studies differences between texts quantitatively, and shows how simplistic models of texts can be used to uncover their complex relationships.
The very term “stylometry” and the field’s development is closely linked to the problem of authorship attribution and identification – the paper briefly introduces the early history of…

Keywords: cultural data analytics, cultural analytics, digital humanities, complexity, semiosphere, cultural semiotics, cultural science
Digital Humanities (DH) has been a success story in the academic world over the last twenty years which has opened many new vistas in the humanities research. However, we argue that it is better to consider DH as a transitory phenomenon that needs to be developed into more specific research fields in order to overcome some fundamental shortcomings of DH. First, it is vital to transcend the division between qualitative inquiry into ideographic phenomena and quantification of nomothetic phenomena. This specifically includes the emergence and analysis of…

Keywords: digital humanities, data in humanities, digital methods
The article serves as a preface to the special issue on digital humanities of Keel ja Kirjandus. The aim of the issue is to familiarize the Estonian readers with the complex and controversial notion of digital humanities by way of examples. The issue gathers overviews of themes and methods in digital humanities along with empirical case studies representing them. We provide a brief discussion on what digital humanities is and why we need it. We consider that the core of digital humanities is the integration of digital data into humanities research. A growing…