Andrew Piper, Professor and William Dawson Scholar; Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures; McGill University
Andrew's work explores computational approaches to the study of literature and culture. He is the director of .txtLAB, a laboratory for cultural analytics at McGill, as well as leader of the international partnership grant, “NovelTM: Text Mining the Novel,” which brings together 21 partners across North America to undertake the first large-scale quantitative and cross-cultural study of the novel. He is the author most recently of Enumerations: Data and Literary Study (Chicago 2018). His work concentrates on two principal facets. The first uses data-driven techniques to better understand the social functionality of fictional writing by examining the features that distinguish fictional from non-fictional writing. The second explores cultural inequality and cultural capital with respect to contemporary novel writing I.e., the biases of language, discourse, and representation that surround and maintain cultural hierarchies.
Arthur Jacobs, Professor of Experimental and Neurocognitive Psychology, Dahlem Institute for Neuroimaging of Emotion (D.I.N.E.), Freie Universität Berlin (FUB)
As part of the interdisciplinary “Languages of Emotion” project of FUB, he led a team investigating the “Affective and Aesthetic Processes of Reading.” He is (co-)author of >250 scientific publications in the fields of reading and eye movement research, psycholinguistics, affective neuroscience, and Neurocognitive Poetics, among which the book ‘Gehirn und Gedicht’ (Brain and Poetry, 2011; with Raoul Schrott). He also serves as associate editor for Frontiers in Human Neuroscience and Scientific Study of Literature. Beginning with an extensive review of the neurocognitive studies on schemes and tropes (‘Gehirn & Gedicht’ [‘Brain & Poetry’], 2011). he developed novel machine-learning assisted computational tools for predicting the beauty of words (Jacobs, 2017), of poem lines (Jacobs, 2018b), or of poetic metaphors (Jacobs & Kinder, 2017, 2018). He also published the first specialized training corpus and vector space model for computational stylistics studies in English, the Gutenberg English Literary Corpus (Jacobs, 2018a) and a review of computational stylistics from a neurocognitive poetics point of view (Jacobs, 2015, 2018b).
Karina van Dalen-Oskam, Head of the Department of literary studies, Huygens Institute for the History of the Netherlands; Professor in Computational Literary Studies, the University of Amsterdam
Karina is an active member of the international digital humanities community, where she currently serves as chair of the steering committee of the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations (ADHO, www.adho.org). Her research deals with the analysis of literary writing style and readers’ evaluation of literature, building on her expertise in literary studies, medieval studies, onomastics, and lexicography.
J. Berenike Herrmann, Senior Research and Teaching Associate at the Digital Humanities Lab, Basel University
Berenike applies computational and reader-response approaches to the study of literature and culture. She is PI of the corpus stylistic project “KOLIMO” and the co-located SNF-Project “Research Epistemologies in text-based DH after the Machine Learning turn”, applying computational humanities methods to the study of online literature reviews. She is Management Committee member of the COST Action Distant Reading and current chair of ADHO Special Interest Group "Digital Literary Stylistics". She pursues two principal research questions: The first one is text-driven, using computational and also reader-response methods to examine how particular features of fictional and nonfictional writing relate to aesthetic effects and social-cultural functions in discourse. The second strives to understand the potential as well as the constraints of the digital transformation of society and the Humanities, exploring how computational methods interact with modes of scholarly thinking and how individuals make sense of literature and culture in web 2.0 environments.