Photopoems in illustrated magazines between 1895 and 1945

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Stephanie Catani
• Subject Area: German Literary and Cultural Studies (Modern German Literature) ; Image and Language Processing, Computer Graphics and Visualisation, Human Computer Interaction, Ubiquitous and Wearable Computing ; Art History
• Term: since 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 537316226

Situated at the intersection of literary studies, media theory, comparative media studies and digital humanities, the project proposed here is concerned with the quantitative and qualitative recording, indexing and research of a bimedial genre that has so far been largely ignored by literary and media studies: the photo-poem. The project focuses on the strong presence of the genre in German-language illustrated newspapers, journals and magazines in the period 1895-1945, and is based on the premise that the history and characteristics of the genre are directly linked to the illustrated magazine as a specific form of publication. The first aim of the project is to create as complete a corpus as possible, which will be made possible through cooperation with various libraries and extensive archival research. A second goal of the project is a (meta)database on the corpus, whose research data will be prepared for interdisciplinary research and academic work in cooperation with the Center for Philology and Digitality (ZPD) in Würzburg, published transparently and managed sustainably. This also includes semantic tagging of the image component, which opens up the prospect of further use of the data created (e.g. 'AI tagging'). The third aim of the project is to carry out qualitative and quantitative research within the framework of a "Research Centre: Photo-poems" attached to the chair. Here, the history of the German-language photo-poem will be systematically compiled and the photo-poem, which so far has been largely ignored in terms of genre aesthetics and theory, will be explored for the first time as an aesthetic genre in its own right.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• Co-Investigators: Dr. Christian Reul; Dr. Michael Will