Le trascrizioni dei sogni dei sopravvissuti di Auschwitz: analisi linguistica e tematica secondo un modello XML-TEI

Abstract

In 1973, a psychiatric team from the Medical Academy of Krakow sent a questionnaire to Auschwitz survivors. The 147 people who answered, provided the material behind this research project: daily lives, anxieties and hopes through the stories of their dreams before, during and after imprisonment. Having come into possession of this unpublished material, we present the results of the textual analysis performed, in collaboration with the University of Gdansk, on the corpus of dreams. We used the TEI-XML standard for text encoding to describe dream relationships semantically and grammatically. The original corpus has been studied with a critical approach exactly like in literary texts, and the analysis was also carried out on two careful translations, performed by us, in English and in Italian. We then evaluated the frequency of semantic fields, in particular groups of words (names, verbs, adjectives or adverbs) used to describe the functions of the five senses and statistically studied the onset and use of terms related to the pathology of Post-Traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).