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

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Prof. Dr. Berenike Herrmann

Telephone
+49 521 106-67194
Telephone secretary
+49 521 106-3702
Room
UHG U6-122

Prof. Dr. Berenike Herrmann

About

Welcome to my website! I am professor of Newer German Literature with a specialization in Digital Humanities at Bielefeld University. Here, I run the Bielefeld Computational Literary Studies Group. Furthermore, I am PI at two Collaborative Research Centers at Bielefeld University: The project E06 “Vergleichspraktiken in der Genese, Verstetigung und Transformation von ‘Nationalliteratur’. Der Fall Deutschschweiz” at the Collaborative Research Centre CRC 1288 ‘Practices of Comparing: Ordering and Changing the world’ and project A05: “Contextualised metrics of linguistic creativity in literary and non-literary text” at the Collaborative Research Centre CRC 1646 ‘Linguistic Creativity in Communication’. In interdisciplinary projects cutting across the faculties of Bielefeld University, I collaborate with many great colleagues within the Focal Area “Processes of Innovation and Creativity (PINC)“ as well as the Exploration Area “Interdisciplinary Aspects of Housing and Living”. In March 2025, we are hosting the Annual Conference Digital Humanities in German-speaking Countries (DHd2025), with my role being that of the head of the Local Organizing Committee.

My research is at the interface between literary studies and linguistics (continuing the project “LiLi”) and focuses on aspects of reading: readers, texts, contexts, and research methods in between close and distant reading. In particular, I work on (creative) literary style, spatial and affective literary studies, and nation-building, all embedded in a data-driven, praxeological model of fictionality and literariness in context. It addresses questions of contemporary variation and historical change using computational, empirical and mixed-methods approaches. Because of the prominent role of methodology and computation in CLS, I find it very important to address the topics ‘data literacy’, ‘infrastructure’ and epistemology, looking at the practices of literature students as well as the research community.

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.

Current

Input at the end-of-semester event of the Student Council of German Studies

I am very happy to contribute to the end-of-semester event of the Student Council of German Studies at the Faculty of Linguistics and Literary Studies, Bielefeld University. The session, titled "Noch Wreader oder schon Buch-Influencerin? Zu Buch-Wertung im Netz"*, will take place on 16 July 2025 in room S1-500 at 6:00 PM.

Invitation as Expert at the PhD Symposium of the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics

I am pleased to have been invited as an expert to the PhD Symposium at the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics in Frankfurt am Main in November 2025. Further information will follow shortly.

 

Invitation to Panel Discussion on Reading Didactics at the Historikertag 2025

As part of the 54th German Historikertag in Bonn (September 2025), I have been invited to participate as an expert in a panel discussion on reading didactics. Further details about the event will follow soon.
The program can be found here.

 

New Blog Post: “Rethinking Canon Reading”

A new contribution has been published on the university blog inno.teach, addressing innovative approaches to teaching literary canon texts:
“Kanon lesen neu gedacht. Die digitalen Lehrprojekte CanonCult und Canon+: ein Gespräch”
Read the post here.

Recap of a DHd Panel on Literary History

In the first week of March 2025, the 11th annual conference of the association Digital Humanities in the German-Speaking World (DHd) took place in Bielefeld under the motto "Under Construction." On the final day of the conference, a panel moderated by Nils Kellner (Rostock) addressed the contribution of Computational Literary Studies (CLS) to literary historiography.

Panelists Katrin Dennerlein (Würzburg), Berenike Herrmann (Bielefeld), Fotis Jannidis (Würzburg), Marc Lemke (Rostock), and Jana-Katharina Mende (Halle/Saale) discussed the potential, applicability, scope, and limitations of computational approaches to literary history.

A blog post reflecting on the discussion is available here.

 

Panel Discussion

I am very pleased to be an invited panelist at the discussion „Geistes- und Sozialwissenschaften im Zeitalter von KI“ on Wednesday, 25 June 2025, from 15:30 to 17:00, as part of the conference AI meets Humanities & Social Sciences. More information about the event, held at the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna, can be found here.

 

SIG-DLS Mini-Pre-Conference at DH2025

As part of the DH2025 conference in Lisbon, the Special Interest Group "Digital Literary Studies" (SIG-DLS), in collaboration with the ICLA Research Committee on Digital Comparative Literature and the CLS INFRA project, is organizing a Mini-Pre-Conference on Monday, 14 July 2025.

The event is titled "Comparative Literature Goes Digital." Further information can be found here.

 

“Was mit Daten, was mit Sinn. Zu computationellen Praktiken der Literaturwissenschaft im 21. Jahrhundert”

Under this title, I will give a lecture on 7 May 2025 as part of the lecture series “Transdisziplinäre Aspekte digitaler Methodik in den Geistes- und Kulturwissenschaften”, hosted by the Leibniz Institute of European History and the Mainz Centre for Digitality in the Humanities and Cultural Studies (mainzed). More information is available here.

Past Events

Conference Contributions

We are pleased that our conference contributions have been positively reviewed and will be presented at the following international conferences:

  • 09/2025: “Ein Ansatz zur mehrsprachigen Modellierung des alpinen Erhabenen (with Robin-M. Aust, Marie-Christine Boucher, Kirsten Kramer). Deutscher Romanistiktag 2026, Konstanz, D.
  • 06/2025: Using mixed methods to delineate how metaphor interacts with nonfigurative comparison. The case of ‘making’ national Swiss literature around 1900. CERLIS2025: Metaphors in Specialized Discourses in and across cultures, University of Bergamo (with Robin-M. Aust).
  • 06/2025: “Comparing is making. A mixed methods approach to metaphor and nonfigurative comparison in discourse on German-Swiss national literature.” 21th international conference of The International Society for the Empirical Study of Literature (IGEL), Austin, Texas (with Robin-M. Aust).
  • 07/2025: “How creative is literariness? Towards a theoretical-empirical framework for assessing linguistic creativity in fiction.” 21th international conference of The International Society for the Empirical Study of Literature (IGEL), Austin, Texas (with Emilie Sitter, Sina Zarrieß).

DHd 2025 - Under Construction

Almost there! This year's annual conference of the german-speaking Digital Humanities Community (DHd) will take place at Bielefeld University, in collaboration with the HSBI. I am very happy to be speaker of a wonderful and industrious Local Organizing Committee, together with Silke Schwandt, Hendrik Buschmeier, as well as Daniel Kababgi, Marja Kersten, Lore Knapp, and Christian Wachter -- and a fine crowd of student assistants. All are doing everything they can to make DHd2025 an enriching and constructive experience, in tune with the conference theme "Under Construction. Geisteswissenschaften und Data Humanities“. 

Check out our website! You understand German and want to get a view behind the scenes of the organization? Listen to the RaDiHum20 podcast with Silke Schwandt, Marja Kersten and myself: (Link)

 

Mind and Data - What will the school and university of the future look like?

Which subjects and skills are the future of schools and universities? What should the curricula of tomorrow look like? How is “datafication” changing learning and teaching at schools and universities? This will be the topic of the workshop followed by a panel discussion on March 3 in the Wissenswerkstadt.

The evening workshop will take place as part of the international conference on Digital Humanities in German-speaking countries (DHd2025), which will be held at Bielefeld University from 3 to 7 March and is being organized in cooperation with the conference organizers and Wissenswerkstadt and with the participation of BiLinked. Participation is free of charge, but registration is requested. (Link)

"Impressed by Reading. Measuring the Impact"

With an international group of scholars we are organizing the interdisciplinary workshop "Impressed by Reading. Measuring the Impact" at the NIAS Lorentz Center in Leiden (The Netherlands) 24-27 February 2025. Topics are

  • How to Measure the Impact of Reading: Methods and Theories used in Current Research
  • Digital Social Reading
  • Language Specific Book Reviews
  • Computational Impact Model

 

Interview "5 Questions for ... Berenike Herrmann | CRC 1288 on Hertz 87.9”

In this interview format I answered five questions on our current CRC in german language. (Link)

 

Associated project "Computational Literary Studies of Fictional Space and Affect" at the DFG Priority Program "Computational Literary Studies"

Our Bielefeld research project "Computational Literary Studies of Fictional Space and Affect" has been associated with the DFG Priority Program "Computational Literary Studies". In this research project, Daniel Kababgi, Robin Martin Aust, Marie-Christine Boucher and I are asking questions about literary space and affect, landscape and sentiment, and the spatial coordinates of diegesis and their affective evaluation in literary-historical change. More here:

 

February 2024: Guest lectures at Kyushu University Fukuoka, Japan

I am thrilled to have been invited to Kyushu University Fukuoka, Japan. At the invitation of Prof. Dr. Yasumasa Oguro, I gave two guest lectures on my research in the field of digital literary studies.

2024年2月15 日(木)15:30~17:00 "Digital Literary Studies, what do they Entail? On Questions, Methods and Results"

 

“Literary studies - a historical data science? On data literacy and other literacies”

Under this title, I gave a lecture at the University of Rostock on July 11, 2024 as part of the lecture series “Digital Humanities in Focus: Methods, Applications and Perspectives” of the Rostock Working Group Digital Humanities (RosDH).

 

Just Published

- A Fairy Tale Gold Standard. Annotation and Analysis of Emotions in the Children's and Household Tales by the Brothers Grimm (Link)

- Examining the representation of landscape and its emotional value in German-Swiss fiction between 1840 and 1940 (Link)

- Tool criticism in practice. On methods, tools and aims of computational literary studies (Link)

 

Contextualised metrics of linguistic creativity in literary and non-literary text

It is with much delight that my colleague Prof. Dr. Sina Zarrieß and I have learned that our project "Contextualised metrics of linguistic creativity in literary and non-literary text" is going to be funded by DFG for four years. Even better: it is going to be part of the CRC1646, a collaborative research center concentrating on "linguistic creativity in communication" at Bielefeld University. more news will follow! See press release here: (Link)

 

DHd 2024 Passau

Two contributions involving my working group were accepted at the DHd 2024 in Passau:

  • "Towards a Method for Automatic Detection of Implicit Comparisons. A Case Study on 'Swissness' in Literary Histories around 1900" (Robin-M. Aust, Daniel Kababgi, Berenike Herrmann)
  • "Digitalität in der germanistischen Literaturwissenschaft, quo vadis? Ein Bericht aus
    der Praxis" (Marie-Christine Boucher, Julia Gold, Fabian Menke, Matthias Preis, Maximilian Benz, Matthias Buschmeier, Daniel Kababgi, Kai Kauffmann, Walter Erhart, Berenike Herrmann)

 

Opening Digital Editions to Text Mining: Pilot project for a new digital critical edition of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing's complete writings and letters

The Ministry of Science and Culture of Lower Saxony provided 300,000 euros for the preparation of a digital critical edition of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing's complete writings and letters. By the end of 2024, scholars from five institutions, including the Bielefeld literary scholar Professor Dr. Berenike Herrmann, and the Herzog August Bibliothek (HAB) aimed at creating the necessary conditions for a timely digital new-edition. As one of the first critical editions ever, it contained digital interfaces for text mining. This allows to computationally analyze Lessing's writings in comparison with contemporary writers, but also in diachronic change. In both cases, new digital corpora can be created in a flexible way, assessing open digital resources such as the German Text Archive, as well as the texts from the projected Lessing edition. Up to now, digital editions have generally served to digitally simulate the analog texts in their materiality, while the systematic extraction of full texts for corpus-literary analyses is a novelty. (Link)

Workshop - "SIG-DLS Seven Years on"

Together with Simone Rebora, Joanna Byszuk, Francesca Frontini, Suzanne Mpouli and Pablo Ruiz Fabo, I organized the ADHO SIG-DLS workshop “SIG-DLS Seven Years on” as part of the international conference DH2023 in Graz. With this workshop, the SIG-DLS aimed to provide a revised overview of the field of Digital Literary Stylistics, in exchange with the workshop at DH2016, which preceded the founding of the SIG. (Link)

 

Interview regarding the CRC 1288: “National literature is a construction with tradition”

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. (Link)

 

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. (Link)

Review - Digital Literacy with ChatGPT: Skills for dealing with digital texts, June 17, 2024

A contribution by James Wiebe and Helena Stahlschmidt

Under this title, Prof. Dr. Andreas Witt gave a workshop and a lecture on 17.06.2024. One challenge in the humanities is dealing with large amounts of data. In these events, the ChatGPT language model was presented as a powerful tool for promoting digital literacy. (read more)

Workshop: Mapping Online Book Reception Across Cultures and Languages (January 25th - 27th)

Addressing the great relevance of cultural practices in the digital sphere, the workshop will pursue a cross-cultural investigation of fiction book reviewing across six languages. The focus is on the practices of ‘non-professional readers’ from different cultural backgrounds and across cultures in digital contexts: On the one hand, we will discuss theoretical approaches to model book reviewing and book reception across different global and cultural spheres: Mapping the field, we address these practices as cultural, literary, psychosocial, medial, linguistic, art-philosophical, but also data-scientific, market-economic and legal. On the other hand, we illuminate which methodologies need to be developed in between ‘close reading’ of individual reviews and large-scale data mining on many million reviews.

Distant Reading in Literary Studies. An Introduction to Tools for Data Literacy. Bielefeld, Dezember 7, 2022

A review of the workshop "Distant Reading in Literary Studies. An Introduction to Tools for Data Literacy" in German is available here.

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Team

Teaching

Bielefeld University

For current and past courses, see the course registry.

University of Basel

For current and past courses, see the course registry.

Projects

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