Since August 2022, I have been working at the fortext lab at TU Darmstadt, led by Evelyn Gius. Initially involved with the EvENT Project, I have been engaged with the PLANS Project since November 2023. The fortext lab not only provides the popular annotation tool CATMA and the fortext.net portal, which introduces beginners to fundamental analysis methods and tools in the field of Digital Humanities, but also operates as a service platform. As part of the Department of Linguistics and Literary Studies at TU Darmstadt, it is embedded in a research environment specializing, among other areas, in Digital Philology, with five out of the department’s eight divisions working in this field.
The EvENT Project (“Evaluating Events in Narrative Theory”), which ran from October 2020 to October 2023, combined methods from Natural Language Processing (NLP) with concepts from literary studies in an interdisciplinary approach to formalize and analyze events in narrative texts. The project was jointly conducted by the fortext lab, with Evelyn Gius as PI, and the Language Technology Group at the University of Hamburg, led by Chris Biemann as PI. The project succeeded in modeling the narratologically central phenomenon of events at the textual surface level, making it machine-readable. This promising approach will continue to be pursued, as initial evaluations suggest it captures primarily fundamental or general events. Further exploration of particularly noteworthy or action-relevant events—often referred to in research as ‘event II’—is a key focus of the successor project, PLANS.
PLANS (“Unitizing Plot to Advance Analysis of Narrative Structure”) is the continuation of the EvENT Project and once again a collaboration between the fortext lab (PI Evelyn Gius) and the Language Technology Group (PI Chris Biemann) at the University of Hamburg. This project focuses on investigating and modeling concepts of plot in narrative theory. It aims to further explore and computationally model the level that bridges events and plot (e.g., characters, scenes, frames, and narrative levels) using language technology methods and narratological concepts. This approach seeks to enable new insights into narrative structure and the narrative constitution of texts.
My Bourdieu-based research currently focuses on the analysis of literary journals. Through computational analyses of literary journals from the period between 1680 and 1970, I aim to gain insights into the genesis, development, and specifics of literary fields in the German-speaking world. By reconstructing the quantitative development of literary journals and examining their content as well as formal design, my research seeks to shed light on the constitution of respective literary fields at specific points in time.