Digital Literary and Cultural Studies

Research Area III

Digital methods change and expand the access to sources, documents, texts, artifacts and other objects of knowledge and open up new research perspectives in historical, literary and cultural studies.

Digital Literary and Cultural Studies

Research Area III

The projects collected in Research Area III "Digital Literary and Cultural Studies" deal with the digitization, modeling, indexing, analysis and publication of research objects that are relevant to literary and cultural studies in a broad sense.

The relevant research objects can be textual and non-textual and range from the holdings of historical libraries of the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period to literary texts from German and French literary history of the 18th-19th centuries, the projection art of the late 19th and early 20th centuries or the historical and modern wine labels from the Moselle region to the French popular novel of the present day.

One focus is on digital collection research. Digital methods support the preservation, cataloging, digitization, and reconstruction of collections, thus ensuring long-term access to objects and the knowledge they contain. By digitally preparing sources, making digitized materials available, and enriching them with Linked Open Data, collections become accessible and researchable far beyond individual institutions. The born-digital collections level also plays a role in the research field by helping to produce sustainable solutions and, most importantly, proactively advocating for awareness in this regard.

The following methods and procedures, among others, are involved in this research area: corpus building, data modeling, indexing with metadata, linking with standard data, modeling as Linked Open Data, linguistic annotation, analysis of style, semantics or layout and some more. All these methods and procedures broaden, change and deepen the research-based engagement with the subject matters, especially focusing on the following:

Digital Literary Studies / Computational Literary Studies

An important element in this field of work is the collaborative project "Mining and Modeling Text", which is a profile area of Trier University in the Research Initiative of the State of Rhineland-Palatinate (2019-2023 ).

Protecting and Researching Cultural Heritage - Cultural Heritage

An example of projects in this area is "Wine Labels in Transition". Within this project, we are continuing our long years of experience with the digitization and research of cultural heritage as part of the CHeST Initiative at Trier University.

Manuscripts and Historical Book Collections

In the field of Historical Manuscript and Book Studies in particular, we are working on the research of transmission sources (manuscripts, historical book collections, etc.) and their production contexts (codicology) or digital reconstructions.