Epistolary Networks | Exilnetz33

The interdisciplinary project, located at the interface of literary studies, edition philology and computer science, aimed at the scientific application and further development of innovative methods of semantic network analysis and visualization and, based on this, attempted to answer genuinely questions of the humanities and the cultural studies from the field of exile, letter and communication research. On the one hand, it was about applying categories and instruments of network research, including and further developing information technology processes, to a humanities text corpus. On the other hand, a new look should be taken at the letter as a biographical and historical testimony to the era of the Nazi era. This not only carried out an initial investigation into the function of the letter nets of exiled writers of this time, but also opened up a new perspective on the “everyday life of exile”.

The aim of the project was the development of a modular, interactive internet-based platform for the visualization and research of social, spatial, temporal and thematic networks in letter corpora. By means of various analysis and visualization offers, it should be possible for the user to formulate questions to the provided correspondence networks from very different perspectives and to generate different views of the corpus adapted to the respective specific research interest. The idea was to determine relationships, to map processes, to make them comprehensible, experiential and researchable, which would otherwise be difficult to recognize due to extensive, complex and scattered text materials.

A colloquium, lectures and an exhibition were held as part of the project. The interactive research platform  could not yet be put online due to the rights situation.