Viennese Feuilleton and Biopolitics in the Interwar Period

This research project examines the Viennese daily newspaper feuilletons of the interwar period from literary and knowledge-historical perspectives, employing digital humanities and computational linguistics (CL) methods. The study focuses on biopolitical knowledge and, in particular, on discourses of eugenics, hygiene, and body culture that were formative for the media culture of modernity. In this context, the Viennese daily newspaper feuilletons are particularly important, as the Austrian metropolis was a center for medical and biological research and its popular communication during the interwar period. It also served as a socio-political laboratory for the reform projects of the Social Democratic municipal government of "Red Vienna." The project will compare the two leading Viennese daily newspapers of the early 20th century: the Arbeiter-Zeitung and the Neue Freie Presse. These newspapers had a significant influence on political and cultural life and will be examined for their cultural and ideological tensions between Austromarxism and the liberal-bourgeois camp. The project aims to examine the diverse manifestations of the newspaper feuilleton in relation to social debate, scientific communication, literature, and art. A special focus will be placed on literary texts published in the newspapers. Novels and stories published in the newspapers by authors such as Joseph Roth, Leo Perutz, Veza Canetti, Gina Kaus, Rudolf Brunngraber, Karel Capek, Karl Schönherr, and others reflect contemporary discourses on eugenics and physical culture that have hardly been researched to date. Combining the history of knowledge with media- and genre-related perspectives on the feuilleton sheds light on the aesthetic dimension of biopolitical knowledge in early 20th- century modernism. With the processing of the two newspapers carried out by the Austrian National Library as part of the project, a comprehensive digital text corpus will be available, with which methods from computational linguistics and digital humanities can then also be made fruitful for data-driven research into the history of knowledge. To this end, the project pursues methodological goals. The goal is to automatically recognize references to people, works, and topics in historical newspaper texts of various types. Methods for named entity recognition are being expanded and adapted to recognize references to people and works. The second main task of the project is the recognition of narratively conveyed topics, which is approached using word embeddings and topic modeling.