Joshgun Sirajzade receives award for outstanding PhD paper

At the annual Dies Academicus on November 12, 2014, Joshgun Sirajzade, member of staff at the Trier Center for Digital Humanities, received an award from the 'Freundeskreis Trierer Universität e.V.' honouring his outstanding PhD paper titled "Das luxemburgischsprachige Œuvre von Michel Rodange (1827–1876). Editionsphilologische und korpuslinguistische Analyse" (Michael Rodange's Luxembourgish Oeuvre: Edition-Philological and Corpuslinguistic Analysis). The 2000 EUR price money was endowed by the City of Trier.

The paper belongs to the research field of the Digital Humanities, incorporating its methods and technology and, thus, contributes to their usage on historical-literary language material. With Luxembourg author Michel Rodange's oeuvre as an empirical basis, the paper focuses on the research question how a literary significant historical text in a comparatively young but unstandardised language can be analysed by employing didgital methods. Of central significance was the idea that classic working techniques in German Studies could be combined with the most recent procedures in Computational Studies, gaining insights and results beyond the range of those retrieved by employing the apllications exclusively.

Joshgun Sirajzade, native of Azerbaijan, obtained a degree in Azerbaijan Philology and Turology at Baku University before leaving the University of Würzburg with an MA degree in IT philology. He started his PhD programme, supervised by Prof Dr Claudine Moulin, at the University of Trier in 2007, finishing summa cum laude in January 2013.
Since 2012, Joshgun Sirajzade is a member of staff at the Trier Center for Digital Humanities, focusing on computerised collation and working in the long term project Arthur Schnitzler: The Digital Historical-Critical Edition.