Balduin Landolt

Jón Ólafsson úr Grunnavík (1705-1779) was a productive scribe and intellectual of his time and can be regarded as a key figure in the early days of scholarly research on Icelandic manuscripts and Old Norse literature. However, his work has yet received little and only selective attention. In my doctoral project I aim to deploy a combination of traditional philological and computationally assisted working methods to situate the opus of Jón Ólafsson within the networks of intellectual exchange among the Dano-Icelandic cultural elite of the 18th century. In a first step, I will build up a digital corpus of Jón’s manuscripts with the aid of automated handwritten text recognition (HTR), which in a second step will be annotated using both named entity recognition (NER) and large language models (LLMs) to identify the discursive networks, in which Jón is partaking with his scribal activity. In a third step, I aim to describe and analyse the identified networks, applying methods and approaches from discourse analysis, actor-network theory, and memory studies.