Uncovering Principles of Sustainability in Literature

In this study, we are looking for early mentions of basic principles of sustainability in literary texts using machine learning. With a trained CRF-classifier we automatically annotated a corpus of about 70 novels from German romanticism and singled out passages with a high frequency of annotations, which we analysed in terms of a concept of sustainability. We thus test whether the application of machine learning used to operationalise high-frequency phenomena can also help uncover less frequent and highly interpretive aspects of narrative texts.