Professor of Newer German Literature specialized in Literary Theory and Digital Humanities

Welcome to my website! I'm professor of Newer German Literature with a specialization in Literary Theory and Digital Humanities at Bielefeld University. Here, I run the Bielefeld Computational Literary Studies Group and am PI at the Collaborative Research Centre ‘Practices of Comparing: Ordering and Changing the world’ (SFB 1288). My research focuses on literary style, spatial and affective literary studies and on questions of historical change, using computational, empirical and mixed-methods approaches.

I am also appointed Private Lecturer in Digital Humanities and Newer German Literature at the Digital Humanities Lab of Basel University. My offices include Acting Chair of the SCC Collections of NFDI Text +, Speaker of the Community of Practice “Data Literacy” of BiLinked at Bielefeld University, and board member of the international ADHO Special Interest Group “Digital Literary Stylistics” SIG DLS. Until its finalization in May 2022, I was Management Committee member of the “COST Action Distant Reading for European Literary History”. In the fall semester 2020/2021, I was visiting professor of Digital Humanities at the Excellence Cluster “Temporal Communities” at FU Berlin.

Interview

Uni Bielefeld has released an interview in which I talk about my new research project in the SFB1288. Here, Robin Aust and I are investigating how practices of comparing shaped ideas of "national literature" in German-speaking Switzerland 1850-1950.

 

Looking forward to the exchange!

On June 29, 17:45 I will be a discussant representing Computational Literary Studies at the Digital Humanities Cologne Kolloquium. The event is aPanel Discussion themed “Are we done? Computational Linguistics between linguistics, digital humanities and large language models.”

 

Lecture

On 5 July I will give an invited lecture titled “Fernes Lesen (distant reading)" in the lecture series “Perspektiven der allgemeinen und vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft” at the Peter Szondi-Institut für allgemeine und vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft at FU Berlin.

 

Computational Humanities Research

I was invited to the programme committee of the 2023 edition of the Computational Humanities Research, hosted December 6-8 at the École pour l’informatique et les techniques avancées (EPITA) - Paris. 
 

ELTeC-gsw has been released

This is a collection of 100 german-swiss literary texts that is part of the European Literary Text Collection (ELTeC), one of the key deliverables of the COST Action ‘Distant Reading for European Literary History’ (CA16204) that ran from 2017 to 2022. ELTeC is a collection of corpora of literary texts that are comparable in nature, scope and quality across several European languages. Its availability is an essential condition for the creation, evaluation and use of multilingual tools and methods of analysis for literary texts. Novels have been chosen among major literary genres for availability and size. Chronological limits are due to constraints related to copyright and availability of quality full texts.

 

Just Published

Herrmann, J. B. (2023). Operationalisierung der Metapher zur quantifizierenden Untersuchung deutschsprachiger literarischer Texte im Übergang vom Realismus zur Moderne. In F. Jannidis (Ed.), Germanistische Symposien (GERMSYMP). Digitale Literaturwissenschaft. Germanistische Symposien Stuttgart: J.B. Metzler. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-476-05886-7_25 (OPEN ACCESS)

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Research and Teaching Associates

• Dr. des. Robin Aust
• Dr. Giulia Grisot
• Daniel Kababgi, M.A.

Current Student Assistants

• Ines Bracht
• Fabio Fromme
• Alexander Hummel
• Erik Meier

Former Research and Teaching Associates

• Dr. Thomas Messerli
• Dr. Simone Rebora
• Dr. Alan Lena van Beek

Bielefeld University

For current and past courses, see the course registry.

University of Basel

For current and past courses, see the course registry.

Current

• DFG, Teilprojekt E06 SFB1288: "Vergleichspraktiken in der Genese, Verstetigung und Transformation von 'Nationalliteratur'. Der Fall Deutschschweiz"
• SNSF-COST Project "High Mountains Low Arousal? Distant Reading Topographies of Sentiment in German Swiss Novels in the early 20th Century"
• NDFI Text+: "KOLIMO+. Optimierung und Offene Publikation des Korpus der literarischen Moderne" (with Alan van Beek)
• Niedersächsisches Ministerium für Wissenschaft und Kultur, Hannover: "Impulsprojekt für eine digitale Neuedition der Werke und Briefe Gotthold Ephraim Lessings" (with Cord-Friedrich Berghahn, Kai Bremer, Peter Burschel, Elisabeth Décultot, & Jörg Wesche)
• Digitalität und Textualität. Mixed Methods in der germanistischen Literaturwissenschaft (Curriculum 4.0.NRW) (with Maximilianz Benz)
• Bi Linked - Bielefelder Lehrinnovationen für kollaborative Entwicklung digitaler Lehr-/Lernformate
  • Speaker of Community of Practice "Data Literacy"

  • Co-PI Community of Practice “Data Literacy” (with Silke Schwandt, Oliver Böhm-Kasper)

Finished

• SNSF-Digital Lives Project "Research Epistemologies in Text-based Digital Humanities: Analyses of Valuation Practices after the Machine Learning Turn" (with Noah Bubenhofer)

• DFG-SPP Project "Advanced sentiment analysis for understanding affective-aesthetic responses to literary texts" (Postdoc Member)

• KOLIMO: A Corpus of Narrative Modern German Literature for Comparative Text Mining (with Gerhard Lauer)

• Distant Reading for Literary History in Europe (COST Action CA16204, Member of Management Committee)

• Text Lab. Digital Edition and Corpus Analysis of Modern and Medieval German Texts (with Heike Sahm, Annelen Brunner and Mathias Göbel)

• CAPSGOE – Computer-based Analysis of Personal Style, Goettingen (with Gerhard Lauer)