Presentation on “Distant reading of War and Peace - can we find something, that we did not know?”

On November 22, 2019, our guest presentation was be from Dr. Anastasia Bonch-Osmolovskaya, professor of Computational Linguistics at the Moscow Higher School of Economics, on: “Distant reading of War and Peace - can we find something, that we did not know?”

The most fascinating question about Leo Tolstoy's masterpiece is why this tremendous novel with more than 500 characters and exhausting historical and philosophical excursus is so still so vivid, being read and also serves as a source for plays, series and opera? Is there some hidden construction inside the text, that supports its plot and composition? In my talk I'll introduce the concept of complex layer analysis and I'll show how the combination of 5 different distant reading methods applied to one novel help to reveal rigid structure of inner oppositions and bring some new insights about Tolstoy's art as device.