SPP 2207:  Computational Literary Studies

• Subject Area: Humanities ; Computer Science, Systems and Electrical Engineering ; Social and Behavioural Sciences
• Term: since 2019
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 402743989

Computational Literary Studies (CLS) are growing, interdisciplinary research field between computational linguistics, computer science and literary studies in the process of establishing itself as a genuine research community. In the past two years, the priority programme Computational Literary Studies has funded and coordinated 10 individual research projects in Germany and Switzerland. The central coordination of the programme has coordinated activity among the individual projects, organised the internal and external communication of the programme and provided logistic support. As a result, the programme has established itself as a central node in the network of CLS researchers, its research is highly visible on the international level. Within the programme, research projects were organised in working groups on "Annotations", "Wordembeddings", "Sentiment Analysis", "Drama" and "Text Similarity" that cooperate on the methodological level by exchanging tools and data and establishing common practices. Working groups and programme meetings were open to the general, interested public to encourage interaction with the wider CLS community. Organising these events, identifying potential areas of cooperation for the initiation of working groups and integrating external researchers as well as representative of other organisations into the activities was a central task of the coordination project. Internally, a large survey has been conducted to evaluate the projects' strategies and requirements in terms of tool use, data management and long-term archiving, which allowed the coordination project to consult and support the research projects regarding their research data management. In response to the specific requirements, especially in the context of cooperating in the working groups, a programme-wide gitlab instance was provided. In the second funding period, the central coordination will continue providing the services and coordinating activities that were established during the first funding period, maintaining and extending contact to external researchers and organisations and organising programme events. As an additional task, the programme will develop an online handbook of computational literary studies. This handbook will contain contributions from leading experts on the important topics of the field and provide a state-of-the-art reference work for both students and researchers new to CLS.

• DFG Programme: Priority Programmes
• International Connection: Switzerland

Projects

• Advanced sentiment analysis for understanding affective-aesthetic responses to literary texts: A computational and experimental psychology approach to children’s literature (Applicants Jacobs, Arthur M. ;  Lauer, Gerhard ;  Lüdtke, Jana )
• Anomaly-based large-scale analysis of style and genre reflected in the use of stylistic devices in medieval literature (Applicants Denzler, Joachim ;  Marshall, Sophie )
• Beyond Words. Semantic and multiword distinctive features for an investigation of literary subgenres (Applicant Schöch, Christof )
• Comparative Annotation to Explore and Explain Text Similarities (CompAnno) (Applicants Nantke, Julia ;  Reiter, Nils )
• Computational Approaches to Narrative Space in 19th and 20th Century Novels (Applicants Helbig, Holger ;  Henny-Krahmer, Ulrike ;  Labahn, Roger )
• Coordination Funds (Applicant Jannidis, Fotis )
• Emotions in Drama (Applicants Dennerlein, Katrin ;  Wolff, Christian )
• Is Expert Knowledge Key? Scholarly Interpretations as Resource for the Analysis of Literary Texts in Computational Literary Studies (Applicants Jäschke, Robert ;  Martus, Steffen )
• Literary Change. German Poetry between Realism and Early Modernism and Its Relation to Literary, Cultural and Social Developments (Applicants Jannidis, Fotis ;  Winko, Simone )
• Quantitative Drama Analytics: Tracking Character Knowledge (Q:TRACK) (Applicant Reiter, Nils )
• Relating the Unread. Network Models in Literary History (Applicant Weitin, Thomas )
• Structuring Literature: Variants and Functions of Reflective Passages in Narrative Fiction (Applicants Holler, Anke ;  Sporleder, Caroline )
• The beginnings of modern poetry - Modeling literary history with text similarities (Applicants Jannidis, Fotis ;  Winko, Simone )
• Tracing Regularities in Pedro Calderón de la Barca's Dramatic OEuvre with a Computational Approach (Applicants Ehrlicher, Hanno ;  Padó, Sebastian )
• Unitizing Plot to Advance Analysis of Narrative Structure (PLANS) (Applicants Biemann, Christian ;  Gius, Evelyn )

• Spokesperson: Professor Dr. Fotis Jannidis