Abstract:
This study examines British novels from the eighteenth to nineteenth centuries, exploring innovative applications of digital humanities methods in literary emotion research. First, we constructed an automated emotion recognition pipeline based on the NRC Emotion Lexicon, covering large-scale corpora to perform precise extraction and quantification of emotion words from original novel texts. Second, we conducted genre-level emotion trend analysis across two hundred years of literary history. Finally, we extracted scenes with the highest density of emotion words in individual works, supplemented by close reading analysis. Through multi-dimensional visualization and various secondary metrics, we not only delineate temporal changes in emotions such as anger across dimensions of length, frequency, and intensity, as well as the lexicon of emotion-bearing words in specific works, thereby providing evidence for comparative studies of how different authors represent the same emotions. This research demonstrates how digital humanities can provide new perspectives on emotion history and pathways for textual representation in the history of British novels.

Biography:

Dr. Haifeng Hui (惠海峰) is Professor of English, and Director of the Digital Humanities Lab at the School of Foreign Languages, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, China. He researches children’s literature from diverse theoretical perspectives, including narratology, stylistics, adaptation studies, and digital humanities. He serves as an Advisor Board member of International Research in Children’s Literature. Haifeng’s recent publications include Adaptation of British Literary Classics for Children (Peking University Press, 2019), “Canon Studies in China: Traditions, Modernization and Revisions in the Global Context,” Poetics Today (2021), “Embedded Mental States in Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief and Uneven Distribution of Narratorial Attention,” Orbis Litterarum (2023), “What Can Digital Humanities Do for Literary Adaptation Studies: Distant Reading of Children’s Editions of Robinson Crusoe,” Digital Scholarship in the Humanities (2023).