(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 4249 records, 13,523 CDs, and 5362 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). The new project »Recitations and Musical Settings of Literature« is funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, 2024–2027) and builds on the foundations laid by the cooperation project »Textklang: Mixed-methods-Analysis of Poetry in Text and Sound«, funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) until January 2024, and the project »Author Readings. Digitization, Archiving, Indexing, and Presenting Documentary Recordings of German-language Author Readings« (BMBF, 2017–2020). The current project addresses research desiderata in the fields of poetry, language, and music studies by undertaking deep indexing of approx. 5000 sound media carriers, in particular anthologies. This includes material from the literary estates of Kurt Tucholsky, Mascha Kaléko, and Karl Mickel as well as from the Friedrich Silcher Archive.

The student conference »Podcasts as/about Literature« (5 June – 6 June 2025) in cooperation with the University of Stuttgart, the Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen/Studio Theater and Literature, and the University of Bamberg, explores the many facets of a modern acoustic medium of literaricity and literature communication.