Between Law and Literature: The Criminal Case Collection Der Neue Pitaval (1842–1890) in Digital Corpus Analysis

Abstract

Legal and literary studies have traditionally relied on text interpretation within a hermeneutic framework. However, the rise of Digital Humanities has introduced computational methods for analyzing large text corpora, challenging classical approaches. To validate these new methods, they must be compared with the results of traditional research. In this study, we used corpus analyses of all 570 texts in the criminal case study collection Der Neue Pitaval (1842–1890) to explore core hypotheses previously proposed based on only three percent of the case studies. Using stylometric clustering, topic modeling, and word embeddings, we were able to both confirm and refine existing knowledge about the key role of Der Neue Pitaval in 19th-century German public debates on criminal law reform, criminal trials, and evidentiary procedures. Our stylometric analysis provides evidence that Pitaval criminal case studies represent a distinct textual form. They differ from contemporary literary genres and representations of criminality in popular journals through their complexity and vocabulary richness. A quantitative semantic analysis of the corpus highlights the collection’s focus on the sequence of events in criminal acts, with murder being the most frequently discussed crime. While the collection maintains an even gender distribution, narratives of poisoning strongly adhere to binary gender stereotypes.