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Digital Literary Studies

Digital literary studies, one of the more recent field in philology, is characterized by the combination of conventional and digital methods. On the basis of distant reading, literary historical studies of sources and cultural contextual competence, research questions are tackeled in a way that they can be operationalized for the use of digital tools. Digital literary studies change the style of thinking in dealing with theories and interpretations and prove to be a fruitful method of text and data analysis.

GCDH founder Gerhard Lauer was interested in studying literature by means of digital methods and tools. One of his projects was to identify texts from Robert Musil, an Austrian philosophical writer, who wrote in WWI for the Tiroler Soldaten Zeitung in Bozen. These text, generally with no author, might be attributed to Musil through authorship verification, a method used in digital literary studies and connected to stylometrie. Other projects by Berenike Hermann on Kafka "In a test bed with Kafka. Introducing a mixed-method approach to digital stylistics" have been published in DH Quaterly. For more recent studies in Digital Literary Studies see this website.