Funded by the IZfB (2022), Function: Applicant (together with Prof. Dr. David Wiesche, sports science)

The project "Bodies. Images. Discourses" analyzes, from an interdisciplinary perspective, how students deal with representations, commentary and constructions of physicality in physical, digital and hybrid spaces. Questions about construction of the physical norm in hybrid discourses and the development of body-related knowledge among students are the focus of the interdiscplinary observation within the research platform education in the digital world (ForBild).

Discourses about bodies not only take place in digital spaces but, also through the (creative or consumptive) use of social networks in the physical space of adolescents. It can be assumed that peer groups of students also engage in body-related discourses in the (physical) school environment, thus creating a hybrid discourse. Through a contruction of hybrid, body-related discourses, potentially relevant mechanisms of action in the development of self-referred knowledge are addressed are addressed in collaboration with Prof. Dr. David Wiesche (sports science).

Funded by CAIS NRW (2022-2023), function: applicant (together with Prof. Dr. Michael Beißwenger)

The Center for Advanced Internet Studies (CAIS NRW) has approved Michael Beißwenger and Eva Gredel a working group on the topic of "Corpora as digital education technologies". In the age of digital transformation, the reflective handling of digital data is an area of competence that is increasingly finding its way into educational standards, university curricula and school syllabuses, and is associated with data literacy. In recent years, there has been a growing recognition that it is not only researchers who can use the well-developed corpus infrastructures of linguistics for scientific purposes, but that teachers and learners can also benefit from access to corpora when reflecting on language and for the purposes of data-supported language analysis in schools and universities, or when learning languages in foreign language teaching.The aim of the working group is to systematise approaches and concepts for the use of long-term corpus infrastructures in teaching and learning in order to develop appropriate usage scenarios for different teaching contexts and to develop teaching and learning materials. The working group comprises a total of 12 researchers from five different countries, who will travel to CAIS in Bochum for joint working meetings in 2022 and 2023. Since April 2021, CAIS has been expanded as an institute for digitalisation research in North Rhine-Westphalia in order to understand the fascinating dynamics of the digital age and to be able to participate in shaping it.

The dissertation project deals with the transformation of knowledge, the subject of which also represents its temporal and situational context: the COVID-19 pandemic. This is a current topic that is relevant to society as a whole and has a high level of discursive dynamism, which is particularly  reflected in digital information sources such as the user-generated online encyclopaedia Wikipedia. Not only has Wikipedia been among the top ten most visited sites on the World Wide Web for years (cf. Clement 2021; Gredel 2018, p. 17; Okoli et al. 2014, p. 2831), but is also characterised by the fact that current topics and events are recorded encyclopaedically there in the shortest possible time. Based on the assumption that knowledge is a communicative product and, as such, is changeable and negotiable, Wikipedia proves to be particularly fruitful for researching knowledge dynamics, as content on its pages can be updated, revised or put up for discussion at any time. All changes and negotiation processes are archived and can be fully reconstructed, making Wikipedia a “laboratory case” for the analysis of discourses as a whole and for the investigation of “the network of people and their communicative interrelationships” (Lobin 2021, p. 9).

Funded by DAAD (2021-2023), function: participant, URL: https://www.literacies.net/ 

Questions of literacy and mediality are essential for teaching technical, cultural and intercultural skills in German studies research and teaching, especially when it comes to understanding current cultural, social and media developments and their influence on the acquisition of German as a second language, and applying the insights gained to second language acquisition (SLA; German as a foreign language/German as a second language). On this basis, the GIP aims to explore the overarching theme of  'literacy' to include questions of mediality not only in their contexts but also in their historical development,  in order to make current discourses and changes in the concept of “literacy” fruitful for teaching and curriculum development in German studies on both sides of the Atlantic, which also takes social and political issues into account in its academic perspective. Fundamentally, the proposed GIP assumes that processes of understanding must be thought of in more complex terms than just reading and writing skills.

Funded by the Ministry of Science, research and and art (2019-2022); function: co-applicant

The aim of ‘digilog@bw’ is to identify the impact of digitalisation on people and the resulting social changes and to analyse them in an interdisciplinary manner in order to lay the foundations for shaping digital change in a positive way, both technically and politically, for the benefit of humanity. To this end, the research network focuses on three central themes of digitalisation in its projects: autonomy, knowledge and participation. Understanding these topics is of paramount importance for actively shaping digital change in a positive way. The technical and political design of digitalisation must start with these topics if the change is to succeed for the benefit of humanity. The topics of ‘autonomy’, “knowledge” and ‘participation’ are addressed in an interdisciplinary and cross-location manner. To this end, the research network brings together expertise from Baden-Württemberg from university and non-university research in the humanities, social sciences, law, economics, media and communication sciences, ethics and computer science, as well as interdisciplinary technology assessment at the highest scientific level. Digilog@bw also stands out in that it establishes a multi-layered dialogue with the public through exhibitions, discussion events and lecture series organised by the Centre for Art and Media Karlsruhe (ZKM). 

Funded by DFG (09/2016-12/2021), function: speaker

Discourse linguistics, a relatively new subdiscipline of German linguistics, deals with the question of how social realities are constructed in transtextually organised units. So far, texts from digital media (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, Wikipedia) have hardly been taken into account. The planned network brings together researchers who are working on the analysis of digital discourse in their projects, using digital methods of corpus linguistics and . The aim of the network is to expand the programme and methodological inventory of discourse linguistics in two directions: On the one hand, the specific descriptive categories and analytical tools for discourse in digital media (including links and hashtags) are to be systematised. Secondly, methods and instruments of corpus linguistics and digital methods are to be evaluated and expanded with regard to the requirements of discourse linguistics. This will be achieved through case studies fed from the members' ongoing projects, which are linked to each other by reference to common questions and focal points of the working meetings. The results will be discussed with relevant experts and collaborators in order to expand digital language resources with regards to the analysis of digital discourses or digital analyses of discourses.

Further information is available at: www.diskurse-digital.de

Post-doctoral lecuturing qulification project (since 06/2014), funded by Margarete von Wrangell-Habilitationsstipendium (2017-2022)

Wikipedia is not only a encyclopaedia  that serves as a primary source of information for many people in their everyday lives, but also one of the most successful projects on the Web 2.0. This free encyclopaedia can be interpreted as a social space in which knowledge is negotiated linguistically by many actors. From a media linguistics perspective, the project examines the media framework conditions created by the underlying wiki software and the possibilities for knowledge presentation that this opens up: Wikipedia as hypertext is characterised by features such as multimodality and non-linearity, interactivity, adaptivity and openness (Storrer 2012: 286 f.).

Central questions are therefore which patterns of integration or combination of different media objects (text, image, audio and video files) and which strategies for linking text parts via hyperlinks can be reconstructed. Based on the postulate of hypertext linguistics (Storrer 2008: 328), the programme of hyperdiscourse linguistics should therefore be projected: Hyperdiscourse linguistics is understood as a field of discourse linguistics according to Foucault, which deals with the application of discourse linguistic categories to hypertexts and also discusses new methods and models that lead to an adequate discourse-analytical description of media discourses in social networks.

Project with conference funded by the Fritz Thyssen Foundation

It has long been commonplace in research that images and media allow us to reconstruct knowledge about their historical, social and discursive context. It is also undisputed that this knowledge is subject to a diachronic process of change and that it is aesthetically shaped. Based on these observations, it seems worthwhile to examine socially significant fields of discourse (economics, politics, theology) in the context of multimodal discourse analyses with regard to established knowledge bases, discursive dynamics and staging strategies relevant to aesthetics.

But what perspective do visual, linguistic, media and literary studies take in the representation and research of economic contexts? The hypothesis that serves as the starting point for the conference is that visual media reveal three different perspectives with regard to the thematisation of economic contexts. This three-way division of perspectives means that visual, media and literary studies – in addition to investigations into the socio-economic production conditions and marketing strategies of visual media – also have three different angles from which to explore the economic content of visual media.

Third-party funded project of Compass-Gruppe GmbH supported by the Technology Agency of the City of Vienna (04/2013-06/2014) in collaboration with Prof. Dr. Beate Henn-Memmesheimer

The aim of the Senteasy project was to develop an ontology-based linguistic text analysis system capable of using syntactic and semantic information at word, sentence and text level to evaluate the opinion-forming potential of texts in social media.

The answer to the question of the opinion-forming potential of a text contribution on the Internet is becoming increasingly important in all areas of social life today, especially in the political and economic spheres, with the increasing spread of various social media networks and tools, diverse evaluation options and the most differentiated digital content offerings. Public opinion on a significant political issue is no longer formed over weeks, but within hours. Opinion is no longer shaped solely by traditional media such as newspapers, radio and television, but by millions of internet users. Due to the increased speed at which opinions are formed and disseminated, it is therefore all the more important to recognise negative opinions or tendencies in advance in order to counteract them, while also identifying positive developments/trends at an early stage.

Book project with Dr. Hannah Dingeldein (05/2014-02/2016)

Eating and drinking are basic human needs and, beyond that, they are also always vehicles for communication and information. The question of how people feed themselves (e.g. fast food or organic products), how food and meals are selected, purchased and prepared, and in what setting and atmosphere and in what company they are consumed, goes far beyond an interest in the purely nutritional function of eating and drinking.

Against the broader backdrop of semiotics as the study of signs, this volume examines a variety of sign systems (including language, images and space) with reference to food – and all the implications that this entails. For example, the selection of certain dishes (such as at a banquet) can be interpreted as a sign from which other actors draw conclusions based on knowledge shared by society as a whole. Food itself, together with its associated meanings, thus takes on the significance of a resource for expression that needs to be analysed.

Within the framework of this anthology, food and drink in all their diversity of forms will be examined from an interdisciplinary perspective (literary, linguistic, media, cultural studies, as well as philosophical, sociological, historical and political science).

Finished dissertation project funded by state graduate funding programme of Baden-Württemberg (12/2008-02/2014)

The study develops theoretical, methodological and empirical foundations for a theory of meaning that understands linguistic innovations and discursive dynamics not as special cases, but as the norm. By integrating aspects of systems and action theory, discourses can be described as places of meaning change. The analysis focuses on metaphorical patterns as discursive semantic units. The case study on the discourse object ‘virus’ demonstrates that relatively stable protometaphors are repeatedly differentiated in innovative settings: In addition to analysing the metaphorical inventory of virus as an image recipient (e.g. fight against viruses), the transdiscursive drifts of the lexeme are documented, which lead to virus also functioning as an image donor in many contexts (in newspaper articles, in Bundestag minutes and in print advertisements) (e.g. virus of corruption). The analysis of multicodal metaphors substantiates the discourse sensitivity of images in print advertisements and leads to the postulate of the multicodal expansion of discourse analyses. On a methodological level, the study evaluates the possibilities of pursuing discourse-analytical questions using existing online text databases.