The Institute of Literary Studies, Department of Modern German Literature I of the University of Stuttgart is in charge of the pilot project going under the name of “ePoetics“, which will start in March 2013 and is being funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) over a period of three years with a total amount of 650,000.- Euros. Using analytical methods from computer sciences, computer linguistics and hermeneutics in the humanities, German-language poetics from the period from 1770 until 1960 will be developed, visualised and put into a new type of perception context. The overall aim of the project is a further development of the eHumanities, meaning the application of modern information technologies in humanities research as well as the development of new methods of developing text corpora based on information technology.
Prof. Sandra Richter, Institute of Literary Studies, Department Modern German Literature I at
the University of Stuttgart, who compiled from approx. 1000 poetics and aesthetics bibliographied
in her book “A History of Poetics“ an historical and systematic representative selection of 20
scripts for the digital text corpus to be examined, underlines the interdisciplinary dimension of
the research project: “The information technology methods will make a decisive contribution towards
developing the multi-layered corpus in terms of concept and structure and going beyond the
hermeneutical findings of literary studies and to visualise its dynamics.“
For University Rector Prof. Wolfram Ressel the project represents another step in the
direction of the specific design and profiling of the Stuttgart humanities: ”Vital momentum for the
topic of eHumanities in the cooperative research campus at the University of Stuttgart will be
given by the research project ”ePoetics“. Already today the successes of the Stuttgart humanities
are highly acclaimed and justify a unique selling point for the future further development of this
culture of knowledge.“
Among the involved association partners in the research project “ePoetics – corpus development
and visualisation of German-language poetics (1770-1960) for Algorythmic Criticism“ are:
Prof. Thomas Ertl, Institute of Visualisation and Interactive Systems (VIS) at the University
of Stuttgart, Prof. Jonas Kuhn, Institute of Natural Language Processing (IMS) at the University of
Stuttgart as well as Prof. Andrea Rapp, Institute of Language and Literature Studies at the
Technical University of Darmstadt. In addition there are cooperations with the infrastructures
CLARIN, DRIAH and TextGrid.
The project is divided up into five work packages, each with one project partner in charge and partly running parallel but also based on each other: the initial setup of the digital corpus and a metadata schema is assumed by Computer Philology at the Technical University of Darmstadt, the corpus analysis following this on the development of annotation tools and their integration in the CLARIN infrastructure is in the hands of Natural Language Processing at the University of Stuttgart, the visualisation through developing visual analytics is taken care of by the Institute of Visualisation and Interactive Systems at the University of Stuttgart, whilst the connection of hermeneutic, language technology and visual analyses is assumed by Literary Studies department at the University of Stuttgart in the framework of ”Algorithmic Criticism“. The Project Management and PR work to represent and publish the results takes place as the fifth work package jointly under the management of Literary Studies at the University of Stuttgart.
Contact:
Dr. Hans-Herwig Geyer, University of Stuttgart, University Communication,
Tel. 0711/685-8255, Email: hans-herwig.geyer [at] hkom.uni-stuttgart.de