I’m a Research Assistant at the Department of Digital Philology - Modern German Literature at the Technical University of Darmstadt. As a member of the fortext lab, I am currently working in the field of digital humanities, and computational narratology. My academic interests include the sociology of literature (with a particular emphasis on Pierre Bourdieu’s field theory), magazine studies, literary theory and the methodology of literary studies. My work primarily explores modernist German-language literature, with a special focus on Eastern and Central Europe.
At the fortext lab, I contribute to the project »Unitizing Plot to Advance Analysis of Narrative Structure (PLANS)«, led by Evelyn Gius and Chris Biemann (Language Technology Group, University of Hamburg). This project is part of the DFG Priority Programme 2207 »Computational Literary Studies«. Our research aims to advance the computer-assisted analysis and modelling of plot concepts in narrative theory. By combining NLP techniques and narratological approaches, we develop plot units to deepen our understanding of narrative structures and the construction of narratives in literary texts.
From late February to early April 2024, I was a visiting researcher at the Moore Institute at the University of Galway (Ireland) through the CLS INFRA Transnational Access Fellowship Programme. During my stay, I engaged in intensive exchanges with colleagues from English and German literary studies as well as Digital Humanities, focusing on both modern studies and questions related to computational methods. My TNA talk was titled “Clash of the Modernists: Periodicals as an Object of Research in Literary Studies.” I discuss my stay in Galway in an interview clip with CLS Infra. In summary, it was an exciting time in Galway that provided important insights for my research and interesting perspectives on another European academic system.
I was invited to speak at the interdisciplinary conference entitled »KI – Text und Geltung. Wie verändern KI-Textgeneratoren wissenschaftliche Diskurse?« [AI – Text and Validity. How do AI text generators change scientific discourses?] (25/26 August 2023) on the topic of ‘Artificial intelligence and literary expertise’. The corresponding article, co-authored with Evelyn Gius and Dominik Gerstorfer, was published in an anthology in January 2024.
In this article, we explore the conditions, challenges and opportunities that arise when applying large language models (LLMs) in literary studies. We present case studies from literary studies seminars and argue in favour of the proactive inclusion of large language models in university teaching. Dealing with AI-generated texts and images will undoubtedly become a key competence in the near future, and literary studies, as a social environment of the analysis of texts, text forms and their reception, will face significant challenges in this regard. The volume edited by Gerhard Schreiber and Lukas Ohly has already been published digitally as open access by De Gruyter.
In early November 2023, the second workshop organized by the network Bourdieu in the Humanities (BiG), the association Neugermanistik Wien, and Prof. Dr. Norbert Christian Wolf took place in the Schreyvogelsaal of the Vienna Hofburg. The workshop focused on the theme ‘Autosociobiography and Bourdieu’, bringing together members of the BiG network and guest speakers to explore the emerging genre of autosociobiography, particularly its significance in contemporary German-language literature.
Together with Julian Häußler from the fortext lab, I presented on the topic ‘Deutschsprachige Autosoziobiographien 2017–2022. Eine explorative computationelle Korpusstudie’ (‘German-language Autosociobiographies 2017–2022: An Explorative Computational Corpus Study’).
An anthology based on the workshop discussions is expected to be published in 2025.
In a special issue of the open access journal ‘Textpraxis. Digitales Journal für Philologie’, Evelyn Gius and I provided an overview of the “Evaluating Events in Narrative Theory” (EvENT) project. In this article, we discuss how we adapted events, widely considered central to narrative construction in narratology, machine-readable and thus modelled on the surface level of text, as well as how we generated narrativity graphs of texts on this basis.