A Growing Literature of the Public Sphere: Fiction in Danish Newspapers (1666–1850)

Pascale Feldkamp, Alie Lassche, Rie Eriksen, Kit Morgenstjerne, Kristoffer Nielbo, Johan Heinsen, Yuri Bizzoni


Abstract
Digitized literary corpora of the 19th century largely focus on standalone volumes, sidelining the broader and more diverse literary production of the period. Fiction published in less enduring formats – such as novellas and serialized pieces in newspapers – remains underexplored, particularly for low-resource languages like Danish, despite the growing availability of digitized newspaper archives. This paper addresses that gap by identifying and tagging fiction in Danish newspapers (1666–1850). We (1) present a manually annotated dataset of 1,831 articles with both binary (fiction/nonfiction) and fine-grained subcategories (travelogue, biography, essay), and (2) evaluate a document-embedding classifier that achieves an F1-score of up to 0.89 for the fiction/nonfiction distinction. Building on this pipeline, we further provide two resources for future research: (a) fiction probability scores for nearly five million newspaper articles (n=4,898,084), and (b) a small, cleaned, and curated subset of newspaper fiction (n=139), intended as a growing resource.
Anthology ID:
2026.pressmint-1.8
Volume:
Proceedings of the First Workshop on Creating Interoperable Corpora of Historical Newspapers
Month:
May
Year:
2026
Address:
Palma de Mallorca, Spain
Editors:
Maciej Ogrodniczuk, Petya Osenova, Tanja Wissik
Venues:
PressMint | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
40–49
Language:
External URL:
https://lrec.elra.info/lrec2026-ws-pressmint-08
DOI:
10.63317/4ekyjogsy8zg
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Pascale Feldkamp, Alie Lassche, Rie Eriksen, Kit Morgenstjerne, Kristoffer Nielbo, Johan Heinsen, and Yuri Bizzoni. 2026. A Growing Literature of the Public Sphere: Fiction in Danish Newspapers (1666–1850). In Proceedings of the First Workshop on Creating Interoperable Corpora of Historical Newspapers, pages 40–49, Palma de Mallorca, Spain. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
A Growing Literature of the Public Sphere: Fiction in Danish Newspapers (1666–1850) (Feldkamp et al., PressMint 2026)
Copy Citation: