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

Talks

• I have been invited to give a talk at the 63rd Annual Conference of the Leibniz Institute for the German Language (IDS), Mannheim, in March 2027. More information will follow soon.
• In November, I will travel to Zurich to attend the conference “Neue Perspektiven auf Johanna Spyri: Texte und Kontexte”, University of Zurich (17–19 November 2026) with a contribution from the perspective of Computational Literary Studies.
• On 21 October 2026, I have been invited to the Literaturwissenschaftliches Kolloquium at the Institute of German Studies, University of Osnabrück. The working title of my talk is “Philologisches Lesen im Zeitalter von KI”.
• From 1 to 3 September 2026, Claudia Hillebrandt, Emilie Sitter, and I will travel to Oxford to participate in the conference “Living With Kafka” at the Kafka Research Centre, Wadham College. Our joint paper is titled “Oniric soundscapes? On the creative potential of the auditive modality in Franz Kafka’s prose.”
• On 8 July 2026, I will give a guest lecture titled “Literaturwissenschaft als Datenwissenschaft” in the lecture series “Perspektiven der Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft” at the Peter Szondi Institute of Comparative Literature, Freie Universität Berlin.
• On 1 July 2026, I have been invited to give a guest lecture in the course „Spitzen.Gedichte“ at the Faculty of Philology, University of Freiburg im Breisgau. The working title of my talk is “Influencing, Embodiment und Ästhetisches Erleben. Zur literarischen Kommunikation in der digitalen Gegenwart.”
• I will give a talk in the Integrative Lecture Series at the Institute for Digital Humanities, University of Göttingen on 12 May 2026. My talk is titled “Data Humanities: Three Case Studies and a Funeral”.
• On 7 May 2026, I will speak in the lecture series “Digitale Realität? Computer als Werkzeug der Erkenntnis in den Wissenschaften” at the University of Münster. The title of my talk is “Alles neu macht der Computer? Zur erstaunlichen Unwahrscheinlichkeit einer deskriptiven Literaturwissenschaft”.

The CLS Group at the International Conference Digital Humanities in Daejeon, South Korea (DH2026)

We are pleased that our conference contribution (long paper) has been accepted through peer review for the international DH2026 conference in Daejeon, South Korea:
Daniel Kababgi, Emilie Sitter, Berenike Herrmann, “‘In Berlin no grass grows. In Vienna it withers.’ A quantitative spatial-semantic comparison between Berlin and Vienna in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.”

In addition, as a member of the Steering Committee of the Special Interest Group “Digital Literary Studies” (SIG-DLS), I am co-organizing the SIG pre-conference Mini-Conference titled “DH2026 – Digital and/or Comparative Literary Studies Today.”
Further information and the call for contributions can be found here.

BiLinked Project Completion: Interviews and Podcast

The project BiLinked – “Bielefelder Lehrinnovationen für kollaborative Entwicklung digitaler Lehr-/Lernformate” (funded by the Stiftung Innovation in der Hochschullehre) has been successfully finalized at the end of 2025 after four years of interdisciplinary collaboration. Within BiLinked, I served as spokesperson of the Community of Practice “Data Literacy”, which I co-led together with Prof. Oliver Böhm-Kasper and Prof. Silke Schwandt. As part of the project wrap-up, several colleagues and I were interviewed to reflect on our experiences and on the development of innovative digital teaching and learning formats.
Video interview available here.

Here’s a podcast episode recorded by my colleague Dr. Matthias Buschmeier and I:
Episode 7, “Eine interdisziplinäre Perspektive auf Lehren und Lernen: Welchen Mehrwert bringt der interdisziplinäre Austausch?“ in the BiLinked podcast, discussing community building, interdisciplinarity, and innovation in teaching.
Podcast episode available here.

The CLS Group at the Annual Conference of the German-speaking Digital Humanities Association in Vienna (DHd2026)

The CLS group participated with five posters at the annual conference of the Digital Humanities in German-speaking countries (DHd) association, held from 23–27 February 2026 at the University of Vienna under the theme “Not Only Text, Not Only Data”. All contributions were accepted through peer review and have appeared in the conference proceedings. Three of the five posters were held by students of German Studies and Literary Studies, for whom this was the first conference participation with their own research. All contributions applied computational methods to address research questions in literary studies. The first contribution (Aust/Herrmann) uses network analysis and graph-theoretical methods to evaluate archival material from literary foundations in order to model, from a socio-historical and literary-historical perspective. It shows howactors and practices are involved in the doing of “Schweizer Nationalliteratur” (SFB 1288). The second contribution (Sitter, Rehage, Herrmann) presents the “Kreativitätsduell” ('creativity battle’), a game with a purpose in which players compete against “AI” with the goal of producing more creative short texts than the machine. The game serves as a data collection tool for research on textual creativity (CRC 1646). The third contribution (Wiebe, Duda, Boucher) introduces a self-learning module designed for students and instructors in literary studies to foster data literacy, focusing on domain-specific skills such as building digital text corpora and analysing them with regard to style, gender, genre, and historical change. The example case is the genre of Bildungsroman (BiLinked CoP Data Literacy). The fourth contribution (Weiße) investigates spatial semantics in a single novel, Doktor Faustus by Thomas Mann. By combining hermeneutic interpretation with computational analysis, the study identifies four spatio-temporally distinct frames that are symbolically and narratively charged. The fifth contribution (Boucher) explores the potential of enriched library metadata for translation studies and reports on the first catalogue-based study to examine literary translations into German in the period from 1990 to 2010.

• Boucher, M.-C. (2026). Big Translation Data. Zum Potenzial angereicherter Bibliotheksdaten für die Übersetzungsforschung. DHd 2026 Nicht nur Text, nicht nur Daten (DHd2026) (DHd2026), Wien, Österreich. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18999668
• Herrmann, J. B., & Aust, R.-M. (2026). 'Hoppla, die Indices!' Eine graphentheoretische Auswertung von Literaturstiftungsarchivmaterial zur Annäherung an die literaturhistorische Praxisformation 'Schweizer Nationalliteratur'. DHd 2026 Nicht nur Text, nicht nur Daten (DHd2026) (DHd2026), Wien, Österreich. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18999613
• Sitter, E., Rehage, K., & Herrmann, B. (2026). Mehr Text! Mehr Daten! Das Kreativitätsduell als transmodales Game with a Purpose zur Datenerhebung für die textwissenschaftliche Kreativitätsforschung. DHd 2026 Nicht nur Text, nicht nur Daten (DHd2026) (DHd2026), Wien, Österreich. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18999670
• Weiße, P.-M. (2026). Große Ideengeschichte auf Small Data. Eine Mixed-Methods - Untersuchung zur Raumsemantik in Thomas Manns Doktor Faustus.  https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18702984
• Wiebe, J., Duda, T. A., & Boucher, M.-C. (2026). Text trifft Tool und heraus kommen Daten. Eine Selbstlerneinheit zu domänenspezifischer Data Literacy in der Literaturwissenschaft. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18702929

Workshop: Metadaten in den «Humanities» at the Central Library in Zurich

On 4 and 5 December 2025, I had the pleasure of contributing an evening lecture entitled "Daten, Wissen und Bedeutung. Überlegungen zur Zukunft der Humanities" to the workshop "Metadaten in den ‚Humanities‘" at the Zurich Central Library (Switzerland). The lecture explored the relationship between data infrastructures, epistemic practices, and research questions from the perspective of Computational Literary Studies. The workshop, organized by Dr. Elias Kreyenbühl and Dr. Hendrijke Schauer, addressed the highly topical question of how (meta)data from diverse sources—including libraries and archives—shape and support research in the humanities. Dr. Marie-Christine Boucher, also from the CLS working group, contributed a lecture entitled "Aus dem Forschungsort DNB: Geschichte der literarischen Übersetzung ins Deutsche".

Wissenshappen - Event Review

On 6 November 2025, the Collaborative Research Centre CRC 1646 “Linguistic Creativity in Communication” participated in the interactive public format “Wissenshappen” at the Wissenswerkstadt Bielefeld. The event invited seniors, adults, and young people aged 14 and above to explore current research on linguistic creativity and its intersections with artificial intelligence. Across three expert stations, researchers provided concise insights and engaged in discussions with the audience. More here.

Event Recap: “AI Meets School – A Futures Workshop”

On 6 November, the WissensWerkStadt Bielefeld hosted the future-thinking workshop “AI Meets School”, an interactive format exploring how learning and education must evolve in a world increasingly shaped by AI-generated content and conversational agents. Together with participants, the workshop examined multiple possible futures of schooling: Will learning take place primarily at digital devices, or will the social space of school become more important than ever?

The workshop addressed not only teachers but anyone interested in the future of education. It was organized in cooperation with Bielefeld University, the Faculty of Educational Science, and the Faculty of Linguistics and Literary Studies. More here.

Video Recording: Panel Discussion “Geistes- und Sozialwissenschaften im Zeitalter von KI”

On 25 June 2025, I participated as an invited panelist in the discussion “Geistes- und Sozialwissenschaften im Zeitalter von KI”, held as part of the conference AI meets Humanities & Social Sciences at the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna.
The video recording of the panel is now available, for further information click here.

Appointment as a member of a working group of the German Science and Humanities Council

I am delighted to have been appointed as a Humanities expert for a working group of the German Science and Humanities Council that is carrying out a system evaluation of the NHR (National High Performance Computing) Alliance (9/2025).

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

In November 2025, I was invited as an expert on linguistic creativity to the PhD symposium at the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics (Frankfurt am Main). Together with Dr. Örjan de Manzano, we designed the workshop “Measuring Creativity” from an interdisciplinary perspective, drawing on CLS and neuropsychology/musicology.

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.

Conference Contributions

The Bielefeld Computational Literary Studies made the following contributions to international conferences in the summer/autumn of 2025:

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: “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).

Invitation to Panel Discussion on Reading Didactics at the Historikertag 2025

As part of the 54th German Historikertag in Bonn (September 2025), I was invited to participate as an expert in a panel discussion. The topic was the development of a subject-specific reading didactics for the discipline of history, aimed at strengthening students’ reading competencies in a targeted manner.
Further information can be found here.

Input at the End-of-Semester Event of the Student Council (Fachschaft) of German Studies Uni Bielefeld

On 16 July 2025, I contributed an input session at the end-of-semester event of the Student Council of German Studies at the Faculty of Linguistics and Literary Studies, Bielefeld University. The session was titled “Noch Wreader oder schon Buch-Influencerin? Zu Buch-Wertung im Netz”.

Panel Discussion

On Wednesday, 25 June 2025, I participated as an invited panelist in the discussion “Geistes- und Sozialwissenschaften im Zeitalter von KI” as part of the conference AI meets Humanities & Social Sciences at the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna.
More information about the event can be found here, also a video recording is available here.

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

Under this title, I gave 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.

DHd 2025 - Under Construction

From 3 to 7 March 2025, the annual conference of the German-speaking Digital Humanities community (DHd) took place at Bielefeld University in cooperation with HSBI. I served as co-chair of a wonderful and committed local organising committee, together with Silke Schwandt, Hendrik Buschmeier, Daniel Kababgi, Marja Kersten, Lore Knapp, and Christian Wachter, supported by a dedicated team of student assistants.
The team worked hard to make DHd2025 a rewarding and constructive experience, fully in line 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).

‘The Humanities and Data’ - What will the school and university of the future look like?

What are the future subjects and skills of schools and universities? What should the curricula of tomorrow look like? How is “datafication” changing learning and teaching at schools and universities? These questions were discussed at a workshop and panel discussion on March 3 in the WissensWerkStadt Bielefeld.

The evening workshop took place as part of the international conference on Digital Humanities in German-speaking countries (DHd2025), which was held at Bielefeld University from 3 to 7 March. It was organized in cooperation with and WissensWerkStadt and with the participation of BiLinked. (Link)

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 theme “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.

SIG-DLS Mini-Pre-Conference at DH2025

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

The event was titled “Comparative Literature Goes Digital”. Further information can be found here.

"Impressed by Reading. Measuring the Impact"

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

• 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 pursued a cross-cultural investigation of fiction book reviewing across six languages. The focus was on the practices of ‘non-professional readers’ from different cultural backgrounds and across cultures in digital contexts: On the one hand, we discussed 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 illuminated 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.