Stanford Humanities Center
Join us CESTA for its first Tuesday lunch seminar of the new academic year with Svenja Guhr (Postdoctoral Researcher at Technical University of Darmstadt). Her talk is titled "Discovering Fictional Sound: Operationalization and Automation." She will present on her research utilizing computational text analysis, sound studies, and literature. The event will take place in person at Wallenberg Hall, Room 433A, and virtually. Lunch will be provided to in person participants. RSVP here for in person and virtual participation.
Sound is omnipresent in our everyday life, and it is also represented in literary texts: Whether howling wind, babbling brook, screaming girls, or rattling trains - their explicit representation is manifold and enriches the scene setting with information about the soundscapes of fictional worlds. The talk is dedicated to the operationalization of sounds as event units in literary prose, which can be manually but also automatically annotated and relationally divided into different levels of loudness which opens new possibilities for the computational analysis of fictional soundscapes.
About the Speaker
Svenja Guhr is a postdoctoral researcher at the fortext lab (Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany) and has an academic background in German literature, Romance linguistics, and Digital Humanities. As a computational literary studies scholar, her recently completed PhD project focused on the operationalization and analysis of sound and loudness as narratological phenomena in 19th and early 20th century German-language literary prose. Her monograph Raise Your Voice: Character Sound in German-language Fiction will be published in 2025 in the Metzler book series Digital Literary Studies by Springer Nature. Since 2022, she has been a visiting researcher at the Stanford Literary Lab, where she is working on projects on the detection and analysis of domestic space and suspense in 19th-century British fiction.
When
In person and online
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