Research

CHYLSA - Advanced sentiment analysis for understanding affective-aesthetic responses to literary texts: A computational and experimental psychology approach to children’s literature

Emotional involvement is of pivotal importance when children learn to read, tell, and share stories. This crucial dimension of cultural literacy has received surprisingly little attention within literary studies, psychology, and digital humanities. Taking a large-scale and data-driven approach, we develop and validate in CHYLSA AI-based sentiment analysis for computational literary studies. Our testcase are children´s books.

Internal Principal Investigator:

Prof. Dr. Gerhard Lauer

Project Partners:

Freie Universität Berlin, Arbeitsbereich Allgemeine und Neurokognitive Psychologie

Project Duration:

2019–2023

Project Funding:

German Research Foundation, Bonn; Priority Program 2207

Work Group:

Prof. Dr. Arthur Jacobs, FU Berlin
Marina Lehmann M.A., JGU Mainz
Dr. Jana Lüdtke, FU Berlin
Dr. Lisa Luther, FU Berlin

 

›Werck der bücher‹ – Transitions, experimentation, and collaboration in reprographic technologies, 1440–1470

The project investigates the coexistence of different printing technologies in the early years of printing until around 1470, specifically block books and single leaves printed from wooden or metal blocks, possible early forms of printing with movable type, as well as the established technology of printing with type produced with punch and matrix. Extensive watermark analyses will provide clues as to whether and to what extent the different technologies were used in parallel in the same print shops. Pattern recognition-based type analyses will be devoted to the variance in the printed image of early incunabula and will attempt to clarify whether alternative technologies of type production were used.

Internal Principal Investigator:

Jun.-Prof. Dr. Nikolaus Weichselbaumer

Project Partners:

University of Basel, University FU Berlin, University of Haifa, Radboud University, University of Stavanger, University of Trnava, University of Verona, University of Warsaw, University of Vienna, Stiftung Lesen, Barbara Piatti, The Readers.

Project Duration:

2021-2024

Principal Investigators:

Dr. Vincent Christlein (FAU Erlangen-Nuremberg)
Florian Kordon (FAU Erlangen-Nuremberg)
Dr. Stephen Mossman (University of Manchester)
N.N. (JGU Mainz)
Edward Potten (University of Manchester)

Project Funding / Project Number:

German Research Foundation / 468415227

 

ELIT – Empirical Study of Literature Training Network

ELIT is a European programme for the training of doctoral students in empirical, especially experimental methods in reading research and general literary studies.

Internal Principal Investigator:

Prof. Dr. Gerhard Lauer

Project Partners:

University of  Basel, Free University of Berlin, University of Haifa, University, Radboud University, University of Stavanger, University of Trnava, University of Verona, University of Warsaw, University of Vienna, German Reading Foundation, Barbara Piatti, The Readers

Project Duration:

March 2020 to February 2024

Project Funding:

European Commission, Horizon 2020, Marie Skłodowska-Curie Grant

Link to Project Website:

https://www.elitnetwork.eu/

 

Aldus Up – Building Bridges in the Book World

Aldus Up is a network of Eurpean book fairs that focuses on the digitalisation of book fairs across Europe. The network promotes projects and initiatives to further improve book fairs.

Internal Principal Investigator:

Prof. Dr. Christoph Bläsi, Dörthe Fröhlich M.A.

Project Partners:

Italian Association of Editors (AIE) as project coordinator, European Association of Editors (FEP), Editor's Association of Flanders (Boek.be), Lithuania (LLA), Latvia (LGA), Portugal (APEL), Romania (AER) and Norway (NPA), Book fairs of Frankfurt/M., Bologna, Vienna and Rome, LIA-Foundation and Germán Sánchez Ruipérez-Foundation (FGSR).

Project Duration:

September 2020 to February 2024

Project Funding:

European commission, Programme Creative Europe

Link to Project Website:

Aldus Up - European Bookfairs Network

 

AuROA – Authors and Legal Certainty for Open Access

AuROA develops model contracts and works for more cooperation and standardisation in Open Access publishing in the humanities

Internal Principal Investigator:

Prof. Dr. Christoph Bläsi, Dr. Anna Klamet

Project Partners:

Library of the University of Duisburg-Essen (Project Lead); Department Communication and Economy of  IST-university for Management in Dusseldorf.

Project Duration:

February 2021 to January 2023

Project Funding:

Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF)

Link to Project Website:

AuROA

 

Mainz Reading Adventures – A Literanauten Learning-to-Read Walk

As part of the Literanauten project, students from Johannes Gutenberg-University and Mainz University of Applied Sciences in Mainz have developed an interactive learning-to-read walk. The offer is aimed at students in the first and second grades. Together with the water dragon Lu and the gnu Gnutenberg, the children embark on a multimedia scavenger hunt in which they can train their skills in dealing with letters, words and sentences. The mixture of stories and puzzles always involves the entire class. In addition to experts from the fields of publishing and museum education, a children's jury from the Goethe Elementary School in Mainz was also involved in the development of the program.

Internal Principal Investigator:

Dr. Anke Vogel

Project Partners:

Mainz University of Applied Sciences in Mainz, Literanauten, Goethe Elementary School Mainz, Gutenberg Museum Mainz, Model Making Workshop of the University of Applied Sciences Mainz

Project Duration:

October 2021 to March 2022

Project Funding:

Federal Ministry for Family Affairs, Senior Citizens, Women and Youth and  Waldemar-Bonsels-Foundation [only in German]

Link to Project Website:

Mainzer Leseabenteuer / Eine Stadt lernt lesen

 

Font Group Recognition for Improved OCR

The project develops algorithms for the recognition of fonts in digitized books. Building on a previous project, which had already achieved recognition of the main text font for a given page, we now develop a way to recognize fonts at the character level, so that, for example, the font changes common in German blackletter typesetting are also detected when they occur within a word. In addition, several thousand lines of training data will be transcribed for each of the 8 most common font groups to improve text recognition for less frequently used fonts. The project is part of OCR-D, the initiative to develop an OCR solution for digitized books of the 16th to 18th century.

Internal Principal Investigator:

Jun.-Prof. Dr. Nikolaus Weichselbaumer

Project Duration:

2020 to 022

Work Group:

Tatjana Hass (JGU Mainz)
Janina Molnar (JGU Mainz)
Anguelos Nicolaou (FAU Erlangen-Nuremberg / KFU Graz)
PD Dr. Christoph Reske (JGU Mainz)
Mathias Seuret (FAU Erlangen-Nuremberg)
Janne van der Loop (JGU Mainz)

Project Funding / Project Number:

German Research Foundation, Bonn / 460605811

Link to Project Website:

OCR-D

Science in the Federal Republic of Germany's Pocket Book 1955 to 1980

The subproject B01 of the SFB 1472 (University of Siegen) aims at a source-based reconstruction of the dissemination history of scientific knowledge using the example of paperback series in both trade and scientific publishing houses (S. Fischer, Oldenbourg, Francke, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht) with reference to three central groups of actors: (1) scholars and authors of scholarly texts; (2) publishers, who decide on topics, writing styles, layout, and distribution of scholarly texts in paperback; (3) readers, who are in part only included in the target audience of scholarly texts through the publication form of the paperback and who engage in the appropriation of scholarly knowledge not least in a paratext-guided manner.

Internal Principal Investigator:

Prof. Dr. Ute Schneider

Project Duration:

Januar 2021 bis Dezember 2024

Work Group:

Prof. Dr. Jörg Döring (Uni Siegen), Ally Heath (Uni Siegen), Katharina Knorr (JGU Mainz)

Project Funding / Project Number:

German Research Foundation, Bonn / 438577023

Link to Project Website:

SFB 1472

 

Scientific Network "Research Field Reading - Reading as a Total Phenomenon“

The interdisciplinary and international network collects the disparate disciplinary findings of current reading research. Colleagues from the cognitive sciences, neurosciences, psychology, communication and media sciences, various pedagogical disciplines (e.g., media, elementary school, and adult education) as well as teaching methodologies, social and cultural sciences, book studies, linguistics, and philology are involved. Scholars exchange their findings in four content-based workshops (subject, spatial, temporal, and social dimensions of reading) as well as in two institutionally oriented workshops. The network then organizes a final symposium.

Internal Principal Investigator:

Prof. Dr. Ute Schneider

Project Duration:

2021 to 2024

Leaders of Network:

Prof. Dr. Svenja Hagenhoff (FAU Erlangen); Prof. Dr. Ute Schneider (JGU Mainz)

Project Funding:

German Research Foundation, Bonn

Link to Project Website:

Forschungsfeld Lesen