Prof Dr Christof Schöch

director

Christof Schöch heads the TCDH together with Claudine Moulin and the two managing directors, Claudia Bamberg and Thomas Burch. He sees himself as a Digital Humanities scholar with a focus on Computational Literary Studies. He is also committed to Open Science.

Topics: Digital Literary and Cultural Studies, Computational Literary Studies

Curriculum Vitae

Degree in Romance and English Studies as well as Psychology in Freiburg and Tours with a thesis on François Bon

2008: doctorate in French Literary Studies with a thesis on La Description double dans le roman français des Lumières 1760-1800 (binational doctorate Kassel / Paris). His thesis was published by Classiques Garnier and received the Prix Germaine de Stael 2010 Award.

2004 - 2011: research assistant in French Literature at the Institute for Romance Studies at the University of Kassel

2011 - 2017: member of staff at the Department of Computer Philology at the University of Würzburg, initially as part of DARIAH-DE (Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities), later as the head of the BMBF Research Group Computer-aided literary genre stylistics

2017: W3 professorship for Digital Humanities at the University of Trier

Committee work, research groups and memberships

President of the Constituent Organisation Board, Alliance for Digital Humanities Organisations (ADHO, 2023–2024; additional roles 2015–2019 and 2022–2025)
First Chair of the Executive Board, Association for Digital Humanities in German-speaking countries (2018–2022, additional roles 2015–2025)
Member of the NFDI4Culture Steering Board (as representative of the DHd Association, 2020–2025)
Chair of the Programme Committee, Annual Conference of the DHd Association 2020 in Paderborn (DHd2020, 2019–2020).
Member of the Scientific Advisory Board, Department of Knowledge-Culture-Transformation, University of Rostock (2019–2022)
Panel Member, European Research Council (ERC), Panel SH5 Consolidator Grants (2017, 2019, 2021)
Member and spokesperson, "Associate Organisation Forum" of the European Association for Digital Humanities (EADH, 2016–2022)
Chair of the Infrastructure Committee, Alliance of Digital Humanities Associations (ADHO) and ex officio member of the ADHO Steering Committee (2015–2019)
Coordinator, Working Group on Digital Romance Studies in the German Romance Studies Association (DRV, 2014–2019)
Chair, Supporting Association, romanistik.de e.V. (2011–2019)

Scholarships and Awards

Visiting professorship, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS), Paris, March–April 2023
Prix Germaine de Stael from the German Association of Romance Studies, 2010 (for the dissertation)
DAAD annual scholarship (for a stay in France)
Scholarship from the German National Academic Foundation (during his studies)

Publications

(Die folgenden Listen enthalten eine Auswahl von Einträgen, für vollständige Angaben siehe meine Homepage. / The following lists contain a selection of entries. For complete information, see my homepage.)

Julia Röttgermann, Johanna Konstanciak, Christof Schöch (2025): "Stylometry and Knowledge Graphs. Authorship Attribution of an Erotic Novel at the Turn of the Century: L'enfant du bordel (1800)". Romanica Cracoviensia, 2025/3, 257-279. – DOI: https://doi.org/10.4467/20843917RC.25.040.22753.
Christof Schöch, Evgeniia Fileva, Julia Dudar, Artjoms Šeļa (2024): "Multilingual Stylometry: The influence of language on the performance of authorship attribution using corpora from the European Literary Text Collection (ELTeC)". Proceedings of Computational Humanities Research 2024 (CHR2024). CEUR Workshop Papers, 2024. – URL: https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-3834/paper9.pdf.
Christof Schöch (2024): "Repetitive Research: A Conceptual Space and Terminology of Replication, Reproduction, Re-Implementation, Re-Analysis, and Re-Use in Digital Humanities", International Journal of Digital Humanities, 2023. – DOI: 10.1007/s42803-023-00073-y.
Schöch, Christof (2023). “Quantitative Semantik: Word Embedding Models für literaturwissenschaftliche Fragestellungen”. In Digitale Literaturwissenschaft. Beiträge des DFG-Symposiums 2017, edited by Fotis Jannidis. Stuttgart: Metzler. – DOI: 10.1007/978-3-476-05886-7_22.
Keli Du, Julia Dudar, Christof Schöch: “Evaluation of measures of distinctiveness: Classification of literary texts on the basis of distinctive words”. Journal of Computational Literary Studies 1.1, 2022. – DOI: https://doi.org/10.48694/jcls.102. – See also: conference paper.
Schöch, Christof, Maria Hinzmann, Julia Röttgermann, Katharina Dietz, und Anne Klee. 2022. „Smart Modelling for Literary History“. International Journal of Humanities and Arts Computing (IJHAC) 16 (1): 78–93. https://doi.org/10.3366/ijhac.2022.0278.
Schöch, Christof, Frédéric Döhl, Achim Rettinger, Evelyn Gius, Peer Trilcke, Peter Leinen, Fotis Jannidis, Maria Hinzmann, and Jörg Röpke. “Abgeleitete Textformate: Text und Data Mining mit urheberrechtlich geschützten Textbeständen.” Zeitschrift für digitale Geisteswissenschaften (ZfdG) 5 (2020).
Schöch, Christof. “Zeta für die kontrastive Analyse literarischer Texte. Theorie, Implementierung, Fallstudie.” In Quantitative Ansätze in den Literatur- und Geisteswissenschaften. Systematische und historische Perspektiven, edited by Toni Bernhart, Sandra Richter, Marcus Lepper, Marcus Willand, and Andrea Albrecht, 77–94. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2018.
Schöch, Christof. “Quantitative Analyse.” In Digital Humanities: Eine Einführung, edited by Fotis Jannidis, Hubertus Kohle, and Malte Rehbein, 279–98. Stuttgart: Metzler, 2017.
Schöch, Christof. “Topic Modeling Genre: An Exploration of French Classical and Enlightenment Drama.” Digital Humanities Quarterly 11, no. 2 (2017): §1-53.
Evert, St., Fotis Jannidis, Thomas Proisl, Steffen Pielström, Thorsten Vitt, Christof Schöch, and Isabella Reger. “Understanding and Explaining Distance Measures for Authorship Attribution.” Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, 2017.
Herrmann, Berenike, Karina van Dalen-Oskam, and Christof Schöch. “Revisiting Style, a Key Concept in Literary Studies.” Journal of Literary Theory 9, no. 1 (2015): 25–52.
Schöch, Christof. “Big? Smart? Clean? Messy? Data in the Humanities.” Journal of the Digital Humanities 2, no. 3 (2013): 2–13.

Talks

“Grundlagen großer Sprachmodelle: Von word2vec über BERT zu GPT”. Workshop Effektives Prompting für Large Language Models in der Romanistik: KI-Anwendungen reflektiert gestalten, org. Verena Weiland und Sascha Resch. AG Digitale Romanistik, 4 Nov. 2025.
“Current issues in copyright and LLMs in Digital Humanities”. Digital Humanities Initiative Talk Series, org. Stuart McManus. Research Institute for the Humanities. Hong Kong: Chinese University of Hong Kong, 14 Oct 2025. – Delivered remotely.
“Open Science und Open Education aus der Perspektive der Digital Humanities” (Keynote). KNOER-Jahrestagung 2025: Open Education und Open Science im Dialog: Synergien für die digitale Transformation der Hochschule, org. Markus Deimann, Konrad Faber. Berlin: Landesvertretung von Rheinland-Pfalz, 16–17 June 2025.
Christof Schöch & Queenie K.H. Lam (林韵香): “Modeling biographical trajectories of overseas-educated Chinese as Linked Open Data (利用關聯開放數據建模受過海外教育的華人傳記)”. The Fifth National Chengchi University (NCCU) – Trier University Joint Conference: Human Values and Social Transformations in the Age of AI . National Chengchi University, Taipei, Taiwan, 29 March 2025.
“Computational Literary Studies: How Digital Datasets, Tools and Infrastructure are Reshaping Literary Scholarship”. Invited Lecture, org. Irakli Khvedelidze. Tbilisi State University, Tbilisi, Georgia, 13 March 2025.
Christof Schöch: “Artificial Intelligence / Large Language Models and the Digital Humanities” (Keynote). Third International Conference on Digital Humanities (CODH-24): The Next Stick and Stone of Civilization, org Irfan Rifai. Binus University, Semarang, Central Java, Indonesia, 30 Oct 2024.
“Towards Computational Comparative Literary Studies: Adressing the Challenges of Multilingualism” (Keynote). Annual Spring Conference of KEASTWEST, org. Youngmin Kim. Dongguk University, South Korea, 25 May 2024.
“Pour une histoire littéraire ouverte et en réseau: le projet Mining and Modeling Text”, Research Seminar of Glenn Roe, Sorbonne Centre for Artificial Intelligence, April 4, 2023.
Christof Schöch & Maciej Eder: “What a difference five years make: achievements and challenges of Distant Reading for European Literary History”. Distant Reading Closing Conference, Krákow / online, April 21-22, 2022.
“Wiederholende und wiederholbare Forschung in den Digital Humanities” (Abendvortrag). Workshop Das digitale Bild – Methodik und Methodologie: fachspezifisch oder transdisziplinär?, org. Hubertus Kohle und Hubert Locher. Philipps-Universität Marburg / DDK – Bildarchiv Foto Marburg, 12.–13. November 2020.
“Current Challenges in Computational Literary Studies“ (Keynote). CDH 2020. Benevolence and Excellence: Digital Humanities and Chinese Culture. Shanghai Library, October 20-21, 2020.
“Repeating and Repeatable: Distant Reading between Past and Future” (Keynote), DH_Budapest 2019, Budapest, September 25-27, 2019.
“What’s in a number? Understanding Measures of Distinctiveness” (Eröffnungsvortrag), European Summer University in Digital Humanities, org. Elisabeth Burr, University of Leipzig, Germany, 18.7.2017.
“Repeating and Repeatable: Digital Literary Studies between Past and Present” (Keynote), Interroger le texte à l’ère de l’intelligence mécanique : la stylistique outillée, au carrefour du disciplinaire et de l’interdisciplinaire, Montpellier, France, June 11-12, 2019.
“Towards a Resarch Agenda for Data-driven Approches to Literary Periods” (Keynote). Annual conference of The Coordinating Committee for the Comparative History of Literatures in European Languages Series (CHLEL): ‘Period Shapers in Literary History’, org. Dirk van Hulle. University of Antwerp, 24.5.2018.

Courses

Regular courses in the Master of Science "Digital Humanities"
Regular courses in the Bachelor of Science “Sprache, Technologie und Medien” (STeM), Digital Humanities-Track
Supervision of PhD projects