Research areas

Lead: Dr. Sabine Bartsch

The research area “Corpus and Computational Linguistics, English Philology” is concerned with the modelling of linguistic phenomena at all levels of linguistic organisation from phonology, lexis and grammar to semantics and discourse in research and teaching. In addition to insights into language, the focus of interest is on the construction and annotation of electronic text corpora as well as the development and implementation of computer-based methods and workflows for linguistic research using electronic corpora.

Lead: Prof. Dr. Evelyn Gius

The subject area “Digital Philology – Modern German Literary Studies” is one of the subject areas at the interface of the humanities and digitisation. The focus is on digital research on texts – from manual, computer-assisted annotation of individual texts to corpus-based analysis using suitable algorithms. Regardless of the method used, it is always about a humanities approach and the possibilities offered by information science. Therefore, in addition to the use of digital methods, reflection on this approach is also central: What actually happens when we analyse our texts with the help of computers?

Lead: Prof. Dr. Andrea Rapp

The subject area “German Studies – Computational Philology and Medieval Studies” brings together a traditional branch of research in German studies with a young discipline that investigates new, computer-assisted methods and procedures in the humanities and cultural studies. The subject of German medieval studies concerns itself with the language and literature of the German-speaking Middle Ages from the 8th to the 16th century. The focus is on codicology and palaeography, multimodal text-image relations, digitisation and corpus construction, linguistic variance and variation, ontologies, edition philology, lexicography, annotation procedures and research (data) infrastructures.

Lead: Prof. Dr. Marcus Müller

Digital linguistics" deals with digital or digitised language data. It develops procedures for collecting, processing, structuring, annotating and analysing language in digital form. Our central subject is therefore digital corpora, which can represent very different genres, e.g. newspaper texts, political debates, scientific essays, tweets, online forums, blogs and much more.

Lead: Prof. Dr. Thomas Weitin

Digital literary studies", the most recent field in philology, is characterised by the combination of conventional and digital methods. On the basis of close reading, literary-historical study of sources and cultural-scientific contextual competence, research questions are abstracted in such a way that they can be operationalised for the use of digital tools. Digital literary studies changes the style of thinking in dealing with theories and interpretations and proves itself as a critical instance between text and data analysis.