My thanks go to my three supervisors: Christof Schöch, Fotis Jannidis, and Hanno Ehrlicher, who supported me with their professional ideas, hints, and feedback during the creation of this thesis, from the first beginnings of the definition of the topic to the guidance during the working process and the finalization of the text. This work has involved much more than reading, thinking, excerpting, structuring, and writing. The project also consisted of collecting, modeling, managing, analyzing, visualizing, and publishing data, working with digital tools and programming. My supervisors assisted and encouraged me in all these activities and are role models for me to follow established as well as new paths in academic work and in the Digital Humanities.
This work on the computational analysis of subgenres of nineteenth-century Spanish-American novels was undertaken within the framework of the BMBF-funded project “Computational Literary Genre Stylistics” (CLiGS) at the Chair of Computational Philology and Newer German Literary History of the University of Würzburg. I am grateful for the fact that I was able to concentrate on my dissertation by working in the project and for the exciting and instructive time and cooperation with the other staff members in CLiGS and at the chair. I very much hope that our paths will continue to cross. I would like to thank, in particular, my co-doctoral students José Calvo Tello, Daniel Schlör, and Stefanie Popp, as well as the project members Robert Hesselbach, Katrin Betz, and Steffen Pielström. For their support in the preparation of my corpus of novels, I would like to thank the student assistants Constanze Ludewig and Jakob Stahl. The CLiGS project has advanced computational genre analysis with corpora in Romance languages, in particular, and I am glad to have been a part of this initiative.
Further supporters have made the elaboration, completion, and publication of this dissertation possible: Thank you to the Ibero-American Institute (IAI) in Berlin for their support in the digitization of several of the Spanish-American novels, which are now part of the IAI's digital library and of the Conha19 corpus that I created as part of this dissertation project. I would also like to thank Thomas Schmid and the Graduate School of the Humanities (GSH) of the University of Würzburg, which not only guided me through the administrative process of doctoral studies but also accompanied the steady progress of the project and opened up additional qualification opportunities. I thank DARIAH-EU for creating the Open Access Monograph Bursary for Early Career Researchers in Digital Humanities. I am very honored to be the first one to receive it. It encouraged me to publish the book immediately in Open Access and, above all, to pursue the approach of linking research data, program code, and text even more consistently. It is only because of the DARIAH bursary that there are now also TEI and HTML versions of this dissertation.
For proofreading and valuable advice on content and form, I thank my supervisors, the members of the Institute for Documentology and Scholarly Editing (IDE), Sean Winslow from the University of Graz and Rebecca Collin from the Academic Writing Consultancy at the University of Rostock. Thank you to Bernhard Assmann for his support in preparing the PDF version of this monograph and to Christopher Pollin for helping me with HTML and CSS complexities. Many thanks to Stefan Dumont for creating the book cover. Thank you to the Ehrenfelder Musikschule and the Urania Theater in Cologne, where I was able to sit, work and write during the pandemic when all libraries were closed.
I would also like to thank those who marked my professional path before my doctoral studies. These are, above all, the staff of the Cologne Center for eHumanities (CCeH) at the University of Cologne, where my work as a digital humanities researcher began and where I later, as a guest, always had a place in an office. I also thank the members of the IDE, which I joined in 2012. The IDE members are colleagues and friends, a group that, regardless of age, locality, or institutional affiliation, advances the topic of digital documentology and editing through joint activities. I am proud that my dissertation can now appear as a publication in the IDE's publication series SIDE, even if it thematically reaches out in the direction of quantitative analysis of historical literary texts, beyond the core field of the IDE. As IDE members always say, “IDE is who you are.” I took that seriously. I would like to thank all the members of the IDE and especially Frederike Neuber, Martina Scholger, Patrick Sahle and Franz Fischer, with whom I have collaborated the most in the past and present.
Looking back even further, I thank my host families, classmates, and friends in Mexico who welcomed me during my year abroad there in 1999 and 2000, through whom I learned Spanish and developed a desire to further engage with their language, culture, and literature. Without them, the topic of this thesis would certainly be very different – or this thesis would not exist at all.
Finally, my thanks go to my friends and family. Thanks to my parents for letting me go out into the world and do what I was interested in, even to the far away places and on the uncertain paths. Thanks to my parents-in-law for taking care of me and having my back when it matters. Thank you, Constantin and Ivo, for bearing with me when I work, for distracting me, as well, and for being there. I dedicate this work to you.
