about

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Welcome to my webpage!

I am professor at the interface of Literary Studies and Linguistics at Bielefeld University (“Newer German Literature with a specialization in Literary Theory and Digital Humanities”) and PI at Bielefeld University’s Collaborative Research Centre ‘Linguistic Creativity in Communication’ (CRC 1646). I am also appointed Private Lecturer in Digital Humanities and Newer German Literature at Basel University), and an associate member of the Herman-Paul-School Graduate of Linguistics in Freiburg i. Br., D/Basel, CH. My current offices include being a member of the Management Committee of the CRC 1646, acting chair of the Scientic Coordination Committee “Collections” of the NFDI Text +, member of the steering committee of the international ADHO Special Interest Group “Digital Literary Studies” SIG DLS, and member of the system evaluation working group of the German Wissenschaftsrat that evaluates the ‘National High Performance Computing Alliance’. Formely, I was speaker of the Community of Practice “Digital Literacy” of BiLinked at Bielefeld University, founding chair of SIG DLS, 2019-2022 I was SIG Liaison at ADHO’s COB. 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.

As a Digital Humanist, I strive to understand the potential as well as the constraints of the data transformation of (global) societies and the Humanities. In my research, with my team at Bielefeld, and in other collaborations, we apply and adapt methods from Data Science, NLP, and Corpus Linguistics, often using quantitative techniques, including Machine Learning and LLMs, but also hermeneutic and historiographic contextualization: mixed methods. I draw on concepts and models from Praxeology, Stylistics, Rhetorics, Literary Historiography, Discourse Analysis, (Neo) Structuralism, and Cognitive Stylistics. One building block for my research are corpora and datasets that digitally represent and create cultural phenomena and artefacts. In order to understand the evaluation and cognitive processes in readers, I also apply methods from cognitive linguistics, reader response studies and crowd sourcing.

My current main project is “A05: Contextualised metrics of linguistic creativity in literary and non-literary text” at the DFG-Collaborative Research Centre “Linguistic Creativity in Communication” (CRC 1646). Prior projects were “Vergleichspraktiken in der Genese, Verstetigung und Transformation von «Nationalliteratur». Der Fall Deutschschweiz”, the SNSF-COST project “Distant Reading Topographies of Sentiment”, the SNSF-Digital Lives Project “Forschungslogiken in den texbasierten DH nach dem Machine Learning Turn”, and the DFG-SPP “Computional Literary Studies — CLS” project “CHYLSA” — Children’s and Youth Literature Sentiment Analysis.

My current main research questions

linguistics and literary studies
linguistic creativity in communication (with a special interest on metaphor)
data humanities & data literacy
the interaction of human and artificial intelligence in the Humanities
emotion representation in literary texts (historical and systematic)
spatial mappings in fictional worlds (historical and systematic)
the style of (literary) texts of the 19th and early 20th Centuries (historical and systematic)
practices of literary evaluation by users of social reading platforms
transnational literary history of German-speaking cultures, using computational methods

I am also keen on finding out more about the effects of reading on well-being.

Membership in academic societies I am a member of the Association Digital Humanities im deutschsprachigen Raum (DHd), the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations (ADHO), as well as of the Schweizerische Gesellschaft für allgemeine und vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft (SGAVL/ASLGC). Among my affiliations are also the International Society for the Empirical Study of Literature & Media (IGEL); German Society for Cognitive Linguistics (DGKL), Sektion Computerlinguistik (CL) der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Sprachwissenschaft (DGfS); and Deutscher Hochschulverband (DHV).

Academic bio I hold a PhD on the topic of metaphor in discourse from VU University Amsterdam (at the prequel of the Amsterdam Metaphor Lab, for which I received the Prize for Humanities from the Göttingen Academy of Sciences and Humanities in 2014. From 2017-2021, I worked as postdoc research associate (“Oberassistentin”) at the DHLab at the University of Basel (Switzerland), and before that I was postdoc research associate (“wiss. Mitarbeiterin”) at the Seminar für Deutsche Philologie at University of Göttingen (Germany) and the Göttingen Centre for Digital Humanities. I obtained my MA (German Language and Literature, Sociology, and Spanish Language and Literature) at the University of Göttingen, studied at Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (DAAD Year Stipend), and I was a trainee at the Max-Planck-Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology Leipzig, Department of Developmental and Comparative Psychology.

Keywords: Artifical Intelligence, Data Literacy, Linguistics and Literature, Computational Literay Studies, Digital Humanities, Literary Theory, Comparative Corpus Stylistics, Cognitive Stylistics, Cultural Heritage, Literary Evaluation, Digital Social Reading, Franz Kafka, Metaphor Studies, Children’s Literature, Sentiment Analysis, Spatial Humanities.