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Projects Research Area 5

Activism and Literature (2023-)

The project aims to systematically investigate the activist potential of literature by examining relevant authors and texts. It seeks to explore how literary imagination has influenced the work of activist authors and why political activism is closely intertwined with literary expression, taking into account often overlooked works that not only reflect societal issues but also serve as catalysts for change.

Digital Observatory of World Literature (2023-)

The aim of this project is to combine historical and current data on world literature in a way that allows large-scale developments to be described and observed automatically. The focus will be on entities such as authors, works and reception records as they are represented via corresponding norm data in digital encyclopaedias, knowledge databases, catalogues and in the Linked Open Data cloud (Wikipedia, Wikidata, DBpedia, Index Translationum, VIAF, various national libraries, etc.). Thanks to standardised semantic linking across all the mentioned digital repositories, mutual references within world literary contexts will be extracted and brought together in a language-independent way. This data will be analysed and evaluated using network analysis and made available in an interactive web app.

Visual Provocations. Data Visualisations as Representations of Performative Models (2021-2022)

The project "Visual Provocations" investigates the role of data visualisation as a tool for modelling temporal communities and constructing data in a performative way in and across different projects in the Cluster. As a first example, the conceptual history of the term "Design Thinking" will be examined and modelled by means of data visualization.

The Living Handbook of Temporal Communities (LHTC) (2019-)

Research Area 5 develops the "Living Handbook of Temporal Communities" (LHTC), an open access publication that serves as a point of reference for the Cluster's research methodology and terminology, and provides a platform for the EXC 2020 community that emerges both locally and globally.

Serendipity: Literary Connectivity on Digital Terms (2019-)

As an exploratory project in Research Area 5, the project pursues two axes of inquiry: it will (re-)construct the communities that feed into, inform and underwrite Horace Walpole’s coinage of ‘serendipity’. At the same time and on a systematic level, the project will discuss ‘serendipity’ as a possible concept for conceiving of literary history as a history of transtemporal and transnational relations.

The Global Reception of Nikos Kazantzakis (1946–1988) (2019-)

How did Kazantzakis become such a famous novelist worldwide? The phenomenon of Kazantzakis’s global reception is approached in praxeological terms, focusing on acts and actors that were involved in building and interrelating communities with potentially global capacities not only to distribute but also to contextually frame his works.

In the Mirror of "Pagan" Dance: North American Indigenous Dance and the Quest for European Origins (2019-2023)

The project critically investigates settler fictions about Indigenous dance in colonial North America. Grounded in the idea that settler "pagan dance" imaginaries are composed of images, texts, objects, and embodied practices, the project traces multimodal fictions of 'pagan dance' from the early modern period through the rise of transhistorical and universalist notions of 'pagan' primitivism among early anthropologists and cultural theorists. Against this backdrop, the project discusses danced practices of Indigenous survivance and the ways that dance is integral to Indigenous religious freedom.

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