Viennese Feuilleton and Biopolitics in the Interwar Period – Combining Close Readings with a Quantitative Analysis of Themes in Newspapers

• Applicants: Professorin Dr. Urte Helduser; Professor Dr. Nils Reiter
• Subject Area: German Literary and Cultural Studies (Modern German Literature) ; General and Comparative Linguistics, Experimental Linguistics, Typology, Non-European Languages
• Term: since 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 550309711

The research project is dedicated to the feuilleton of interwar Viennese newspapers from a literary and knowledge-historical perspective and using methods of Digital Humanities (DH) and Computational Linguistics (CL). At the center of the investigation is biopolitical knowledge, in particular discourses on eugenics. In this context, the feuilleton of Viennese newspapers is of particular importance since the Austrian metropolis was a center of medical-biological research and its popular communication in the interwar period and served as a socio-political laboratory for the reform projects of the social democratic local government of "Red Vienna". Novels and stories by authors such as Joseph Roth, Leo Perutz, Veza Canetti, Gina Kaus, Rudolf Brunngraber, Marta Karlweiß, Karel Čapek, Karl Schönherr and others published in the AZ and NFP reflect contemporary discourses on eugenics in a dimension that has hardly been explored to date. The combination of the history of knowledge with media and genre-related perspectives on the feuilleton will not least illuminate the aesthetic dimension of biopolitical knowledge in the modernity of the early 20th century. The project aims at a comparative study of the two leading Viennese daily newspapers of the early 20th century, the Arbeiter-Zeitung (AZ) and the Neue Freie Presse (NFP), which both had formative influence on political and cultural life, thereby focusing on the cultural and ideological tension between Austromarxism and the liberal-bourgeois camp. The aim is to examine the manifold manifestations of the newspaper feuilleton between social debate, science communication, literature, and art. A special focus will lie on the literary texts published in newspapers. With the full-text indexing of the two newspapers carried out by the Austrian National Library (ANNO project), an extensive digital text corpus will be established and made available for data-driven research. Establishing the corpus requires work both on OCR and layout detection, for which we will employ state-of-the-art tools from artificial intelligence and machine learning. Once the corpus is established, we will quantitatively investigate the persons and locations mentioned in the corpus, i.a. in the form of network analysis. In addition, we will look at how the vocabulary associated with the discourse on eugenics develops over time. To this end, we will focus on specific terms and develop disambiguation techniques for them.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: Austria
• Partner Organisation: Fonds zur Förderung der wissenschaftlichen Forschung (FWF)
• Cooperation Partner: Professor Dr. Roland Innerhofer