Research

In my research, I worked with methods of corpus linguistics and computational linguistics, like annotation, statistical analysis, and machine learning. I love that these methods have possible applications in almost all areas of text based research. Here are some of the research fields I have worked on:

Computational Literary Studies

I was part of the project Q:TRACK that was funded as part of the DFG priority program “Computational Literary Studies”. We worked in quantitative drama analysis with a focus on character knowledge about character relations. For many dramas the flow of information is key, for instance: When does the protagonist discover that her lover is, unfortunately, also her brother?

In an earlier project in Hamburg, hermA, I was involved in work on how coreference annotation influences network analysis of literary text.

Academic Language

I became interested in academic language when I worked as a peer tutor at my university’s writing center as a graduate student. In my PhD thesis, I investigated differences in the academic languages of literary studies and linguistics. My focus was on how these differences can be identified in a data-driven approach.

During my time at the writing center in Hamburg, I was also involved in the creation of the learner corpus KoLaS. The corpus comprises texts from students that visited the writing center and therefore includes many different text types, disciplines and language backgrounds. Specifically, text comments by peer tutors are also available. Subsequently, we did some analyses on the use of ich (‘I’) in academic language and in learner data specifically.