3 | Recording literature: Audio analysis of literature
The field of auditory media and literature has been cultivated for decades in the DLA, although there has been little public awareness of this until recently. The collections comprise over 38,000 media units, including 4,249 records, 13,523 CDs, and 5,362 audio files as well as the audio database www.dichterlesen.net (in cooperation with the Literarisches Colloquium Berlin, funded by the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media and the Federal Cultural Foundation). From 2017 to 2020, as part of the digitisation and indexing project ›Autorenlesungen‹, around 1000 audio documents were archived and presented for an interested public on www.dichterlesen.net for free streaming. A large collaborative project entitled ‘Textklang: Mixed-methods analysis of poetry in text and sound’, funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research since March 2021, is dedicated to these holdings. It arose from a cooperation with the Institute for Machine Language Processing and the Department of Digital Humanities at the University of Stuttgart and focuses on the development of tools for the systematic study of the relationship between literary texts, especially Romantic poetry, and their spoken realisation in recitation or – mediated by a musical setting – musical performance. In the future, the results should also be reusable within the framework of literary audio databases. In the second half of 2023, ‘Textklang’ will be a partner of the international and interdisciplinary summer school of the Marbach Weimar Wolfenbüttel Research Association (31 July-11 August 2023, ‘Literature Data and Digital Literature’) and thus represents a current interdisciplinary research area that, in the course of systematic research into the sonority of lyrical texts, deals with concrete questions of digitisation, metadata acquisition, machine readability, digital speech and sound analysis, and the provision or networking of research data.
Contact
Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach
Department of Research
Schillerhöhe 8-10
71672 Marbach
Telephone +49 (0) 7144 / 848-175
Telefax +49 (0) 7144 / 848-191
Email forschung@dla-marbach.de