Die Neuen Leiden Des Jungen W.

This is the website for a Digital Humanities project based on the Ulrich Plenzdorf book, Die Neuen Leiden des Jungen W. by Brandon Wilson and Julia Yingling.

Our goal is to use a digital version of the text, mark it up as an XML document, and use the markup to reconstruct the timeline of the story. We hope that by doing this, we can show the unreliable nature of the narrator, as well as the way the story spans the idealized individualistic West, the conformity of the Communist East, and the role of German culture in navigating this gap.

The story is not linear, so we've chosen to reconstruct the timeline of the story. In addition to this, we also want to map the references ot west and east based on the chronology of the story as well as the narrative of the story. We hypothesize that as the main character's life progresses and he goes deeper into depression, he references the conformity of the East more.

We used XML to divide the work into scenes based on the various conversations and characters that weave in and out of the life of the protagonist, Edgar Wibeau. You can view the text and jump between the parts we have labeled as "scenes" on the Text page.