Welcome to the team, Benjamin!

TCDH: At the Trier Center for Digital Humanities, scholars from various fields collaborate. Can you tell us more about your academic background and why you are interested in Digital Humanities and Literary Studies?

Benjamin: In short, I come from a tradition of literary studies that, despite the love for the aesthetically valuable artifacts we daily interact with, emphasizes the claim of science. Traditional literary studies claims to develop concepts and categories that should in principle be able to describe any literary text, but in fact only describe a small selection of them due to the large number of existing texts. With the Digital Humanities, more specifically with the emerging Computational Literary Studies, I associate the prospect of being able to partially overcome this limitation. This holds great potential both in terms of literary scientific concepts and in terms of our knowledge of cultural heritage: For example, within a digital annotation where a decision must be made for each individual case as to whether a specific phenomenon exists, literary scientific concepts are sharpened and the development of methods for automatic recognition of literary phenomena such as genres or narratological structures offers the possibility to write new empirically informed literary histories. In one sentence, Digital Humanities open up new opportunities for traditional literary studies, which of course itself represents an incredibly diverse thinking tradition, making it particularly attractive to work at the intersection of both areas.

TCDH: What made you decide to come to the TCDH in Trier with your Heisenberg position? Was there something of particular interest at the research location or the center?

Benjamin: The TCDH is certainly a flagship institution in the field of Digital Humanities with a long tradition that is also internationally visible. In addition to the long-term perspective I was offered by the TCDH, the opportunity to actively shape the area of Computational Literary Studies here was also crucial.

TCDH: Your research project Modernity as Loss?, based at the TCDH, focuses on text structures, variants, and cycles of literary cultural critique. Can you tell us more about it? What inspired you and what goals are you pursuing with it?

Benjamin: This is a project that I have been contemplating for a long time. The motivation is roughly as follows: Modern societies are characterized by continuous change in all areas. This change, although often occurring under the sign of progress, is experienced, interpreted, and generalized as a loss by many people. The culturally and modern-critically thinking fueled by this is articulated not least in literature as a medium of generalized experience. However, what has barely been examined so far is which text structures express different forms of modern critique (in the broadest sense) in fictional literary texts and how this phenomenon presents itself historically in literature. If the automatic identification of relevant text structures, planned within the project, is successful, numerous exciting questions could be answered on a broad empirical basis: Do societal upheavals actually give rise to modernity critique? Does modernity critiquebefore 1945 differ fundamentally from modernity critiqueafter 1945? Is canonical literature more modern-critical than non-canonical literature? Are there specific forms of left-wing and right-wing literary modernity critique? ... just to name a few. From a literary-theoretical and narratological perspective, the exciting aspect of the project is that it attempts to attribute an interpretation-dependent macro phenomenon to text structures on a micro and meso level, for which, in addition to quantitative analyses, hermeneutic-qualitative analyses are also indispensable.  

TCDH: Which corpora are being particularly examined or compared in your project, and why did you choose them?

Benjamin: The project involves the creation of two corpora that build on each other: a literary handbook corpus and a corpus of German fictional narrative texts. The first corpus consists of literary handbooks and literary histories and is used to identify attributions of modern critiqueand related phenomena to specific literary works. From this data, a list of works is then generated in a second step, based on which the narrative text corpus is created. This corpus includes various sub-corpora such as cultural critique, time critique, civilization critique, or regional heritage art. In addition, existing corpora (such as ELTeC-deu) are used for comparative and diachronic analyses.

TCDH: What challenges do you expect to encounter in conducting this project, particularly regarding the connection between literary studies and Digital Humanities?

Benjamin: One challenge lies in the fact that the narratological phenomena captured in the narrative texts, such as literary evaluations, are very complex and context-dependent. This makes both the development of guidelines for annotation and later automated recognition a difficult task.

TCDH: Are there any specific events or plans in your research and work at the TCDH – and also in the aforementioned project – that you are particularly excited about?

Benjamin: It will first of all be exciting to see to what extent the different narratological phenomena can be reliably recognized and annotated intersubjectively. However, I am particularly curious to what extent the manifestations of these narratological phenomena correlate with the extracted global attributions to the literary texts or allow for their automatic recognition.

TCDH: You have been with us at the TCDH since October 2023. Can you already share some of your experiences at the center? What was your first impression, and have you settled in well?

Benjamin: Yes, I think so, I really like the interdisciplinary environment. The TCDH has a very nice and open-minded team where everyone is willing to listen to each other's problems, even though they themselves have a lot to do.

TCDH: Besides the current project, are there other research interests you would like to pursue in the future at the TCDH?

Benjamin: I would rather not reveal too much, I have quite a few ideas in mind. In general, literary critique and its history also seem to be an interesting field worth exploring.