Literary and Linguistic Computing Advance Access originally published online on June 17, 2005
Literary and Linguistic Computing 2005 20(Suppl 1):107-124; doi:10.1093/llc/fqi025
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Tagging Time in Prolog: The Temporality Effect Project
University of Hamburg, Germany
Correspondence: Dr. Jan Christoph Meister, Narratology Research Group, c/o Institut für Germanistik II, Universität Hamburg, Von-Melle-Park 6, D-20146 Hamburg, Germany E-mail: jan-c-meister{at}uni-hamburg.de
This article combines a brief introduction into a particular philosophical theory of ‘time’ with a demonstration of how this theory has been implemented in a Literary Studies oriented Humanities Computing project. The aim of the project was to create a model of text-based time cognition and design customized markup and text analysis tools that help to understand "how time works": more precisely, how narratively organised and communicated information motivates readers to generate the mental image of a chronologically organized world. The approach presented is based on the unitary model of time originally proposed by McTaggart, who distinguished between two perspectives onto time, the so-called A- and B-series. The first step towards a functional Humanities Computing implementation of this theoretical approach was the development of TempusMarker—a software tool providing automatic and semi-automatic markup routines for the tagging of temporal expressions in natural language texts. In the second step we discuss the principals underlying TempusParser—an analytical tool that can re-construct temporal order in events by way of an algorithm-driven process of analysis and recombination of textual segments during which the ‘time stamp’ of each segment as indicated by the temporal tags is interpreted.