Digital Philological Practices: Conceptualization of Time in A.P. Chekhov's Early Prose

This article addresses the task of identifying significant entities in the texts of A. P. Chekhov's works and their semantic annotation in the Chekhov Digital project (a digital edition of the writer's works) by analyzing the concept of TIME in the writer's early prose. The most important objective of the study is to develop an algorithm for applying traditional methods of conceptual analysis in conjunction with digital text processing methods. The conceptualization of themes in the writer's works is revealed using digital methods (Topic Modeling and K-Means clustering algorithm). Based on the studied texts, a corpus study of the lexical-semantic groups of the TIME concept, uniting substantive lexical units with temporal meaning, is conducted. Corpus analysis, together with cognitive analysis methods, allowed for identifying the complexity and multidimensionality of the conceptual system of Chekhov's time, which has varying degrees of verbalization. It is revealed that the complex combination of elements of representation and interpretation of time in Chekhov's works allows one of its components to be considered egocentric time in the context of its connection with the chronotope – "time as a space of life." It is shown that the study of concepts using digital methods makes it possible to identify "patterns" of word combinations associated with entities annotated for semantic search in the Chekhov Digital project. The analysis of the writer's works showed that the annotation of the "time" category requires considering the specifics of Chekhov's time: it is necessary to annotate not only chronological time but also verbal representations of relative time and the author's individual interpretation of time.
The article was prepared within the framework of the project “Mirror Laboratories” HSE University, RF