Worlds of Words: Computational Insights into German Science Fiction

Join us for the next Tuesday Lunch Seminar, an engaging lecture by Fotis Jannidis, Professor of Computer Philology and German Literary History at University of Würzburg, and his two graduate students, Leonard Konle and Thora Hagen, that delves into the intersection of computational methods and literary analysis, focusing on the science fiction genre within the Heftroman—a pivotal format in German popular literature. This presentation will highlight innovative computational approaches used to uncover the genre’s unique characteristics, historical evolution, and its role within the literary system of the Heftroman. The talk will also showcase how computational experiments, such as corpus-based modeling, plot analysis, and semantic studies, are reshaping our understanding of this genre, including its most iconic series, Perry Rhodan. RSVP for lunch or to receive the Zoom link here.

Fotis Jannidis
As Professor of Computer Philology and Modern German Literary History at Julius Maximilian University of Würzburg, Fotis Jannidis has been at the forefront of computational literary studies. His work focuses on corpus-based analysis, including character reference patterns, narrative speech structures, and text segmentation. He has led the national priority research program in Computational Literary Studies since 2020.

Leonard Konle
A Ph.D. candidate at Würzburg University's Graduate School of the Humanities, Leonard Konle specializes in computational modeling of plot structures in genre literature. He is also a research associate on the project “Literary Change: German Poetry between Realism and Early Modernism,” leveraging computational techniques to explore literary and cultural developments.

Thora Hagen
Thora Hagen is a research associate at the Leibniz Institute for the German Language in Mannheim, contributing to the EOSC-funded “DataGEMS” project. She is pursuing a Ph.D. in Computational Humanities at Würzburg University, where she focuses on combining knowledge graphs and language models. Her research includes computational techniques for analyzing historical texts and semantic change, building on her work with the DFG projects “EncycNet” and “Text+.”

Fotis Jannidis's research group has conducted an in-depth examination of various aspects of the Heftroman (German dime novels) over the years, resulting in several publications, including:

Albin Zehe, Leonard Konle, Lea Katharina Dümpelmann, Evelyn Gius, Andreas Hotho, Fotis Jannidis, Lucas Kaufmann, Markus Krug, Frank Puppe, Nils Reiter, Annekea Schreiber, Nathalie Wiedmer (2021): “Detecting Scenes in Fiction: A new Segmentation Task.” Proceedings of the 16th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics.

Leonard Konle and Fotis Jannidis (2022): “Modeling Plots of Narrative Texts as Temporal Graphs.” CHR 2022. Workshop on Computational Humanities Research. Antwerpen.

Leonard Konle, Agnes Hilger and Fotis Jannidis (2023): “On Character Perception and Plot Structure of German Romance Novel”. CHR 2023: Workshop on Computational Humanities Research. Paris.