Lecture Series "Digital Humanities in Focus"
(with co-organization by Fernanda Alvares Freire and Erik Renz)

Starting in WS 2023/24, the course will be offered on a regular basis.

The lecture series "Digital Humanities in Focus: Methods, Applications, and Perspectives" is an interdisciplinary event that explores current research topics and practical application areas of Digital Humanities, aiming to enhance the digital methodological skills of scholars in the humanities and social sciences. It addresses contemporary questions related to the theory, methodology, and practice of Digital Humanities, featuring presentations from representatives of the University of Rostock, as well as invited guests from the German-speaking and international community. Participants further develop their ability to engage with new and current theoretical and practical contexts, reflect on these within the context of their own academic disciplines, and apply them analytically to selected, self-designed scholarly problems.

Digital Modeling of Spaces and Places in Texts

Friday: 11:15 - 12:45, weekly (from 07.04.2023) (13x)

Information about places and spaces represents an important layer in texts that are consulted and studied as primary texts and sources in the humanities. This can involve the geographical location of texts, where a reference to a reality outside the text can be established, but also the construction of places and spaces in texts. How place and space references are established on the linguistic surface of texts is manifold: for example, a direct mention of place names as proper names is possible (e.g. "Rostock"), but also general nouns (such as "the hill", "the bedroom"), deictics ("here", "there") or adverbs ("inside", "outside") can denote places and spaces.
Based on existing textual approaches to the description of spaces and places in texts, the seminar will explore the question of how these can also be captured, modeled, and subsequently analyzed digitally. For this purpose, tools for manual and automatic annotation of place and spatial information will be used and exemplary evaluations will be made on the basis of literary and non-literary prose texts from the 19th and 20th centuries. The attempt to digitally and thus formally model spatial and place information in texts will thereby also reveal their complexity.

Topic models of the European novel in the 19th century

Thursday: 13:15 - 14:45, weekly (from 06.04.2023) (13x)

Topic models are created on the basis of large text corpora with the help of a quantitative text analysis methods. It aims to identify topics in texts, automatically and computer-aided, without having to define a list of topics in advance or to incorporate explicit, linguistic knowledge into the analysis. Topic modeling is therefore particularly well suited for examining text collections on a large, empirical basis with regard to the topics present.
In the seminar, a basic understanding of how topic modeling works and how to apply it will be developed. On this basis, topic models will be created for the multilingual text corpus ELTeC ("European Literary Text Collection"), which contains, among other things, sub-corpora on the novel in German, English and also in Romance languages from the period between 1840 and 1920. To what extent do the themes found in the sub-corpora resemble and differ from each other? Can themes of the European novel as a whole be found and how do these relate to, for example, subgenres of the novel and to the literary trends of the time? Do the results coincide with known knowledge of literary history or do the empirical and quantitative analyses yield new insights into the European novel in the 19th century?

Introduction to Digital Humanities

Starting in WS 2022/23, the course will be offered on a regular basis.

This course provides an introduction and overview of the Digital Humanities as a discipline and interdisciplinary field of research in which research questions from the humanities are addressed using computer-based methods and individual subjects such as literary studies or linguistics come together with computer science. The lecture introduces the theory and history of Digital Humanities and addresses digitization, data development, modeling and standards for research objects in the humanities. Other topics that will be covered include the creation of digital collections and editions and the application of digital methods, e.g., for text analysis and for the visualization of texts and data from the humanities. The use of digital methods in the humanities will also be reflected upon with regard to the possibilities and limits of the knowledge process, sustainability and ethics. In the exercise accompanying the lecture, in-depth readings on the topics of the individual sessions will be discussed and practical insights will be given.
 

Stylometric Analyses of the Novels of Walter Kempowskis

Thursday: 13:15 - 14:45, weekly (from 07/04/2022) (13x)

In autobiographically influenced novels, Walter Kempowski depicts the history of his family and of the German bourgeoisie. In doing so, he develops his own techniques of combining text sections of different themes and types in a collage-like manner, all the while working by themselves. His style is also described as laconic, enigmatic and making implicit judgements. In the seminar, Walter Kempowski's style will be examined in two ways: through a stylistic analysis of the novel "Ein Kapitel für sich" (A Chapter for Itself), based on close reading, and through digital stylometric analyses, which are quantitatively oriented. All of Kempowski's novels are included and also compared with novels by other authors. The result is a discussion of different stylistic concepts underlying the respective methods and different perspectives on the style of Kempowski's novels.

Digital Editions

Thursday: 09:15 - 10:45, weekly (from 07/04/2022) (13x)

With digital scholarly editions, scholarly editions of texts are compiled and made available in digital form as a basis for reading, teaching, and further research. Due to their special medial form, they follow a different paradigm than printed editions, both in theoretical and methodological as well as in practical terms. The seminar will first deal with a theoretical examination of digital editions - what makes them special and how can they be determined in comparison to print editions? How is this demonstrated by existing digital editions in literary studies? What are the challenges of developing and presenting digital editions? Existing digital editions will be reviewed and described on the basis of criteria proposed by various interested parties for the evaluation of digital editions. The criteria themselves will also be discussed and a practical insight into the methods of digital editing will be given.
 

Digital Text Analyses

Thursday: 13:15 - 14:45, weekly (from 14/10/2021) (14x)

In digital text analysis, digitized texts are described and analyzed with the help of a computer. In the sense of "close reading", the computer can be a useful tool for systematically analyzing individual texts or small collections of texts. On the other hand, the term "distant reading" refers to approaches in which very large amounts of text are analyzed digitally and quantitatively. In the seminar, the range of digital text analysis will be presented. In doing so, we will, on the one hand, focus on the workflow, which ranges from the digitization of texts to corpus formation, annotation, analysis and interpretation, and finally to the visualization of results. On the other hand, an overview will be given - also with practical examples - of existing methods and tools for the digital analysis of literary texts. Finally, we will also discuss their prerequisites and possibilities, but also challenges and limitations.

Encoding and Processing Literary Texts with XML

Thursday: 09:15 - 10:45, weekly (from 14/10/2021) (14x)

The seminar will provide basic knowledge of digital text encoding using the Extensible Markup Language (XML). The general markup language XML is the basis for various XML vocabularies for describing data and texts and is widely used in the digital humanities. XML makes it possible to capture and represent texts independently of their subsequent presentation, opening up a wide range of possibilities for interpretation and processing. The seminar will focus on the TEI standard, which is based on XML,  provided by the Text Encoding Initiative (https://tei-c.org/). In particular, the TEI modules that are especially relevant for the encoding of literary texts (narrative texts, dramas, poems) will be addressed. An introduction to the further, computer-aided processing of texts encoded in XML is also given.