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

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.

"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)

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Research and Teaching Associates

• Dr. Robin-Martin Aust
• Marie-Christine Boucher, M.A.
• Daniel Kababgi, M.A.
• Emilie Sitter, M.A.
• Marja Kersten, M.A.

Current Student Assistants​

• James Wiebe
• Milan Kip
• Laura Thiessen
• Karoline Rehage
• Tobias Alexander Duda
• Pierre-Michel Weiße
• Simon Engelbrecht
• Kim Marielle Giersberg

Former Research and Teaching Associates

• Dr. Giulia Grisot
• 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 A05 SFB1646: "Kontextualisierte Metriken sprachlicher Kreativität in literarischen und nicht-literarischen Texten"
• 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)