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Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences

Department of Languages and Literatures

Projects & Collaborations

17 found
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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 These exchanges are hidden in thousands of unpublished manuscripts and obscure print items which need to be digitised, transcribed and made searchable online.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 SwissBritNet will offer fully edited and searchable texts of 1300-plus hitherto unpublished documents from Swiss and British libraries and the metadata for thousands more print and manuscript items, innovative linked-data solutions which enable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.