From Entity Description to Semantic Analysis: The Case of Theodor Fontane’s Notebooks

Abstract

The German writer Theodor Fontane (1819-1898) produced many novels, poems, essays, and other types of texts, including the notebooks which we are currently editing (Radecke 2010, Radecke 2013). Fontane's notebooks constitute one of the last bodies of his manuscript materials that is still not entirely published; only a few excerpts have been published, and these do not comply with standards of textual criticism and editing (Radecke 2010). From 1859 until the end of the 1880s, Fontane lled notebooks with a mass of miscellaneous materials, such as diary entries, letter drafts, plans for poetic writing, prose sketches and drafts, lecture notes, drafts for theater and arts reviews, book excerpts, and also notes and sketches accumulated on his journeys. A total of 67 of these notebooks are known to exist, most of them measuring approximately 10 × 17 cm and containing between 64 and 180 leaves. Some pages have been left blank, so we are dealing with