Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences
Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences
UNIverse - Public Research Portal
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Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences

Department of Languages and Literatures

Projects & Collaborations

25 found
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Dissertation Elmiger: Die Entdeckung, Kategorisierung und Rahmung von isländischen Volkserzählungen im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert

Research Project  | 2 Project Members

Die Nationalromantik im 19. und bis ins frühe 20. Jahrhundert führte zur «Wiederentdeckung» von Volkserzählungen, die in dieser Zeit gesammelt, ediert und veröffentlicht wurden. Diese Publikationen wurden von einer Reihe von Faktoren, darunter politische, kulturelle und wissenschaftliche Rahmenbedingungen beeinflusst. Auch die persönlichen Vorlieben und Überzeugungen der Sammler und Übersetzer spielten eine wichtige Rolle, welche Erzählungen ausgewählt und wie sie ediert und übersetzt wurden. Die Dissertation untersucht die Geschichte der Sammlung und Übersetzung isländischer Volksmärchen im 19. und frühen 20. Jahrhundert, wobei der Fokus auf den Werken von Jón Árnason, Magnús Grímsson und Konrad Maurer liegt. Das Hauptziel der Dissertation besteht darin zu verstehen, wie diese Volkserzählungen verstanden, kategorisiert, eingerahmt und möglicherweise angeeignet wurden. Dabei wird untersucht, ob es einen Unterschied zwischen internen und externen Perspektiven auf Island gibt, wobei die Komplexitäten berücksichtigt werden, die sich aus der Zusammenarbeit von Isländern und Nicht-Isländern im Veröffentlichungsprozess ergeben. Es werden verschiedene Quellen wie Handschriften, Editionen, Übersetzungen, Briefe und Reiseberichte qualitativ analysiert, um zu zeigen, wie die Texte, Editionen und Übersetzungen geformt wurden, um spezifische Wirkungen zu erzielen. Dabei werden Volkserzählungen als ein Forschungsparadigma betrachtet, das sich in einem diskursiven Netzwerk von Wissenschaftlern über einen längeren Zeitraum entwickelt hat und auf früheren Setzungen beruht. Darüber hinaus wird auch der Einfluss der Volkserzählungen auf die Bildung von Forschungsparadigmen in der Skandinavistik analysiert.

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SwissBritNet: Swiss-British cultural exchange and knowledge networks 1600-1780

Research Project  | 3 Project Members

The SwissBritNet project proposes to make a substantial corpus of 17th- and 18th-century documents available in a user-friendly database which will allow students, scholars and a wider audience to investigate Swiss-British relations in the early modern period and so deepen our understanding of early modern networks of knowledge. The study of early modern transnational relations in Europe has been advanced in recent years by digital humanities initiatives enabling the large-scale collection, visualisation and analysis of data designed to improve our knowledge of the Republic of Letters. Joining this international research community, we will highlight the nature and relevance of Swiss-British relations. While both continental anglophilia and the British enthusiasm for Switzerland are often seen as late-18th-century phenomena, we will show that they have a long and intricate history. These exchanges are hidden in thousands of unpublished manuscripts and obscure print items which need to be digitised, transcribed and made searchable online. SwissBritNet will contribute to a more complete picture of the early modern Republic of Letters by making Swiss-British relations and exchanges visible in context. Building on existing database projects and sharing data with the well-established hallerNet platform, we will develop advanced search options, visualisation tools and linked data solutions. Innovative search options will permit complex network analysis, and case studies will ensure that data is modelled with well-considered research questions in mind. SwissBritNet will offer fully edited and searchable texts of 1300-plus hitherto unpublished documents from Swiss and British libraries and the metadata for thousands more print and manuscript items, innovative linked-data solutions which enable collaborations with existing databases and visualisations for search results such as maps, graphs, timelines and 3-D animations. The SwissBritNet database will enable complex inquiries into the networked structure of the Republic of Letters by providing an interoperable, multi-modal database that connects to and shares data with other platforms. Representative case studies based on the corpus will be published in open access monographs and articles. Publications and outreach activities including conferences, an exhibition and transnational stories on the SwissBritNet website will disseminate findings to the academic community and a wider public. For data access longevity, compatibility will be ensured with the DaSCH platform. We are committed to an open access policy and sustainability according to the FAIR principles so that data and software will be freely and reliably accessible to the scientific community.

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Postdramatic Theater in Eastern Europe since 2000: Spaces, Crises, Revolts

Research Project  | 1 Project Members

This project provides the very first comprehensive study of transregional developments in Eastern European postdramatic theater. It analyzes postdramatic theater as a medium that emerges from and reflects on the cultural and political shifts following the postsocialist transformations in Eastern Europe. As an institution that is structurally intertwined with cultural and social crises and that traditionally serves as a platform for public debate, theater in Eastern Europe has recently become an essential venue for reflection and action again. Especially since the 2000s, new postdramatic languages developed that explore forms of destabilizing traditional dramatic functions and modes of transgressing traditional theatrical spaces. These forms of theater have since played a major role both in the performative investigation of social boundaries, upheavals, wars, and autocratic and nationalist politics and in the theatrical exploration of alternative spaces and modes of action in these regions. Despite its importance and unique artistic practices, however, Eastern European postdramatic theater has remained profoundly underestimated by researchers and is largely absent in global postdramatic studies. The main rationale of the project is to rectify that neglect.

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What is a well written text? Holistic and analytic assessment of text quality in L1 and L2 Italian

Research Project  | 2 Project Members

The quality of a written text is often described in figurative terms, such as clearness and smoothness. The explicit description of what makes a text clear and smoothly flowing is a challenging task, probably because the readers' perception of a text is influenced by multiple variables, related to the way information is structured, and how the writer employs the lexical and morphosyntactic resources of a language. The difficulty in translating the readers' perceptions of a text in measurable descriptors leads to challenges in literacy education. For instance, how can educators explain what makes a text clear and smoothly flowing? What are the crucial aspect to focus on when giving feedback or conducting formative assessment? Answering these questions is of fundamental importance, given that writing literacy may have a considerable impact on employability, social participation and lifelong learning. This project aims to explore the relationship between the holistic evaluation of texts, carried out by expert evaluators, and their linguistic characteristics, to understand to what extent it is possible to identify objective and measurable properties that distinguish texts perceived as well written, compared to those with less positive ratings. For this purpose, we will establish a corpus of argumentative and narrative texts, written by university students, who are L1, L2 (or L3) speakers of Italian, a language that has received little attention so far in international research on writing. The methods of analysis involve the use of linguistic indices identified by previous research, which focus on the lexical and morphosyntactic complexity of the texts, and their integration with new indices, based on the Basel model of text analysis. This model contributes to a deeper understanding of the architecture of a text, by analysing how information is structured and hierarchized, and how textual units are connected on different semanticpragmatic levels.

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Resonating networks. Discursive, spatial and personal hubs of research paradigms in Old Norse studies (1650-1950)

Research Project  | 3 Project Members

The binational Weave-project (lead agency SNSF, partner agency DFG) "Nachhallende Netzwerke", based at the University of Basel and Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, aims to examine the origins, discursive constitution, and implications of research paradigms in Old Norse studies. With a methodological foundation in discourse analysis and network-theoretical approaches in the tradition of Bruno Latour's actor-network theory (ANT), it will address how complex and interrelating networks of people, places, texts (both literary and mainly scholarly), and discourses have created Setzungen in the discipline that resonate profoundly in later generations of scholarship across national and linguistic boundaries and still influence recent research up to the present day. The project will study the establishment of central research paradigms and the cross-discursive relationships between these paradigms in Old Norse studies from the beginning of the discipline's research history in the mid-17th century to the mid-20th century. Four PhD theses and one Post Doc project will provide case studies of selected research paradigms, focusing on (P1) the protophilological beginning of textual criticism, (P2) the theorising and nationalistic discursivisation of the concept of myth before, during, and after the Romantic period, (P3) the national appropriation and reinterpretation of Icelandic oral tales in the construction of folktales, (P4) Konrad Maurer's conceptualisation of the Freistaat, and (P5) Heusler's notion of Germanic poetry. These five studies will be complemented by the research of the two Principal Investigators, who will analyse the concepts of (P6) authorship and (P7) genre as metaparadigms that resonate in the scholarly discourse of Old Norse studies in both synchronic and diachronic terms. The project will not only make an important contribution to the history of discourse and networks in the international scientific community of Old Norse and Scandinavian medieval studies from the late premodern period to the mid-20th century. It will also provide insights into the synchronic and diachronic resonance of central research paradigms in the field of Old Norse studies, as well as demonstrate how these paradigms, in the sense of Setzungen, co-determine not only the discourses, but the objects of study themselves. The project will closely cooperate with the archival institutions in Scandinavia, Germany and Switzerland who hold the estates (Nachlässe) of the scholars studied in this project. As part of this cooperation, the project will provide the archives and related catalogues (Kalliope, handrit.is et al.) with new metadata generated in the course of the project work. The close cooperation with the archives will make it possible to directly convert scholarly findings into library reference systems and thus make them available to the general public. Four external project partners with renowned international expertise in different aspects pertaining to the project will accompany the project work as advisors and contribute to the planned project workshops, conferences and publications.

Website: https://www.resonatingnetworks.com/

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Dissertation Wegener: Narratologische Analysen von Schriftartefakten in den Sagas

Research Project  | 2 Project Members

Mit den Bischofs-, Königs- und Gegenwartssagas ist uns aus dem isländischen Mittelalter ein vernakulares Korpus überliefert, das uns vornehmlich aus zeitgenössischer Perspektive von der Geschichte Islands, Norwegens und den Königen und Bischöfen des 12. bis 14. Jahrhunderts berichtet. In diesen Sagas wird von zahlreichen Schriftartefakten erzählt, die im Dissertationsprojekt als Dinge auf ihre Stellung und Funktionen im Erzähltext hin untersucht werden sollen. Leitfragen meiner Untersuchung sind dabei womit Bücher, Briefe, Urkunden, Wachstafeln, Inschriften usw. assoziiert werden (Bildung, Prestige, Vermögen etc.) und wie sie von Erzähler und Figuren behandelt, kommentiert und benutzt werden. Fällen Figuren und/oder Erzähler Werturteile, gerade Bücher betreffend? Mithilfe einer objektorientierten narratologischen Analyse, die sich neben ihrer Schriftlichkeitskomponente auch auf die narratologische Konzeptualisierung dieser erzählten Dinge konzentriert, soll sich mein Projekt ihnen auf eine Weise annähern, die sie sowohl aus der Perspektive der Material Philology heraus betrachtet, als auch ihre Körperlichkeit in Verbindung mit den durch Schrift in ihnen gespeicherten Informationen thematisiert. So gewonnene Erkenntnisse sollen dann für ein besseres Verständnis der Überlieferungsgesellschaft und von Schriftlichkeit und Schrifthandeln in der isländischen Erzählliteratur nutzbar gemacht werden.

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Mapping the Scriptures in Western Sephardi Literature

Research Project  | 2 Project Members

The project seeks to carry out an extensive study on the role and the use of the Bible for the Spanish and Portuguese Jews with a Christian background in newly founded communities of the so-called Western Sephardic Diaspora (1550-1800). A unique feature of these Iberian Jews with a Christian background was the central place occupied by the Bible in the educational, religious and cultural lives, far beyond what was common in the European Jewry of the Early Modern Age. For the first time in history, Jews extensively read and referred to their Bible in (Spanish) translation, opening up a broader audience, engaging more frequently and differently with Christians. Although the importance of the vernacular (above all Spanish) Bible translations is always mentioned in scholarship, no comprehensive study has been realized of the considerable output and content of these translations. Also, no comprehensive study on the particular reception and use of the (Spanish) Bible translations in Western Sephardic literature has been realized, although editions and manuscripts are nowadays largely available in digital collections. A groundbreaking feature of the project is the incorporation of resources and instruments provided by the Digital Humanities. The project aims to "map" the role and presence of the Bible in the Western Sephardi Diaspora in two ways: 1) through an online OA textual database containing a transcription of over 50 different editions of the Spanish Bible translations, as a big data corpus enabling types of distant reading, statistics and visualizations only possible with the help of Digital Humanities; 2) through a series of in-depth studies on the Bible in the Spanish and Portuguese Sephardic literature, such as: the presence and role of the Psalms for the fashioning of individual and collective Converso religiosity/religious identity; the use of the Bible in Spanish and Portuguese preaching of the Western Sephardic Diaspora; iii. the use of the Bible in Spanish/Portuguese polemical anti-Christian or apologetic literature; the presence and relevance of the Bible in both religious and secular Spanish and Portuguese literature produced in the Western Sephardic Diaspora. The studies of the second part benefit from the insights into the use of the Bible gathered with the database made in 1, allowing for finding special "hot spots" of biblical quotations, frequently quoted passages (in translation), the versions of the Bible used (e.g. the Spanish Jewish translation, a Spanish protestant translation, the Vulgata) etc. Other forms of data analysis will also become possible, as for instance, the correlation of biblical quotations with text sorts, targeted readers, authors, etc. The results will be: the online OA textual database (part 1) as a consultable platform and a Virtual Research Environment (VRE); a series of c. 300 transcriptions/editions as base and product for part 2; also available in OA digital format, contributing to the VRE; an international, multidisciplinary conference on the role of the Bible in the Western Sephardic Diaspora in a comparative confessional context; a series of monographic studies (dissertations) and articles.

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Memory, Place, and the Postsouthern in Contemporary US Southern Literature

Research Project  | 2 Project Members

Places of memory in Southern literature do not only contain, but also produce memory. At the same time, memory is not only contained in places, but it also produces places in the South. Memory in Southern literature is a way to make the past productive for the present (and future). It allows for confirmation of the status quo, but it also allows one to re-negotiate and reappropriate the past for the present. Memory is a form of the past that is not equal to history, it can be an agent in and of itself. Literature can function as a medium to transport memory and thus offer an account of the past, but it is not necessarily a historical account of the past either. Both memory and literature provide access to the past in a non-historical sense. Memory allows us to access the past in relation to the present, which means that the present - as the point of where the past is accessed from through the process of remembering - is crucial. In the form of memory, the past is not only accessible, but it can also be adapted and altered, and, thus, made productive for the present or even the future. The meaning of a particular place of memory depends on who remembers, and it may shift along with the present in which the act of remembering takes place. Consequently, places do not only contain memory, but they also produce memory as they reveal a particular access and interpretation of the past from the present point in time. This memory can emphasize some aspects of the past and neglect others as well as present an alternative interpretation of the past or even go as far as imagining a past.