Making BERT Feel at Home. Modelling Domestic Space in 19th-Century British and Irish Fiction

We introduce a novel approach to detecting domestic space in literary texts beyond explicit spatial markers like “home” or “house.” Using a pre-trained English BERT model fine-tuned on manually annotated passages from a corpus of 19th-century British and Irish novels, we develop a method to operationalize and quantify domesticity in fiction. Our model captures the nuances of domestic space by analyzing contextual and relational cues rather than relying solely on toponymic and other explicit references. This approach offers new insights into the representation of space in literature, revealing the fluid and dynamic nature of domesticity in 19th-century British and Irish fiction.