Departments at the Institute of Linguistics and Literary Studies

At the Institute, eight professorships represent the subjects of digital philology, digital literary studies, modern German literary studies, corpus and computational linguistics, English philology, applied linguistics, computer philology and medieval studies, multilingualism and digital linguistics.

Four of these are located in the field of digital philology, which combines digital processes with the development of theory in the humanities. You can find more information on the research profile and current projects on our page on the research focus Digital Humanities.

Digital Philology – Modern German Literature Studies

The field of "Digital Philology – Modern German Literature Studies" is one of the specialist areas at the interface between the humanities and digitalization. The focus lies on digital research on texts – from the manual computer-aided annotation of individual texts to corpus-based analyses using suitable algorithms. Regardless of the respective method, the aim is always to fully exploit the possibilities of information science – but in the context of the humanities. Therefore, in addition to the use of digital methods, it is necessary to reflect this approach: what happens when we use information technology to analyze our texts?

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German Studies – Digital Literary Studies

Digital literary science, the most recent subject area in the field of philology, is characterized by a combination of conventional and digital methods. On the basis of detailed reading, literary historical study of sources, and cultural contextual competence, research questions are abstracted so that they can be operationalized for the use of digital tools.

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Modern German Literature Studies

The subject of Modern German Literary Studies deals with literary texts from the Early Modern Age to the present day. The work on the texts includes text-critical editing, commentary, text analysis, and interpretation.

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Corpus and Computational Linguistics, English Philology

The Department of Corpus and Computational Linguistics, English Philology, is concerned with the modeling of linguistic phenomena at all levels of the linguistic organization of linguistics, lexis, grammar to semantics and discourse in research and teaching. In addition to knowledge about language, the focus lies on building up and annotating electronic text corpora – and on the development and implementation of computer-based methods and workflows for linguistic research using electronic corpora.

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German Linguistics

In the field of German Studies – Applied Linguistics, we devote ourselves to the German language – its structure and its system, but also, primarily, to the different ways of using language in society. Our focus is on text, discourse and variety linguistics.

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German Studies – Computer Philology and Medieval Studies

The Department of German Studies – Computer Philology and Medieval Studies of the TU Darmstadt brings together a traditional branch of German Studies and a young scientific discipline that investigates new computer-assisted methods and procedures in the humanities and cultural studies. The subject area Germanic Medieval Studies focuses on the German language and literature of the Middle Ages from the 8th to the 16th century

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Linguistics – Multilingualism

At the Department of Linguistics – Multilingualism, we address questions regarding the acquisition and the learning of foreign languages, from different perspectives: empirical language acquisition research and theory building, language policy, curriculum discussions, teacher training, and different aspects of practical application.

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German Studies – Digital Linguistics

Digital Linguistics deals with digital or digitized voice data – aiming to develop methods for collecting, processing, structuring, annotating, and analyzing speech in digital form. Therefore, we are mainly concerned with digital corpora which can represent very different genera, e.g. newspaper texts, political debates, scientific essays, tweets, online forums, blogs, and much more.

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