A »Poetry Hackathon«: Schiller, Hölderlin, Mörike, Celan

Understanding literary works of art as data, observing them, processing them, analyzing them, and interpreting them - including in a visually creative way - is currently transforming itself from an affront to philology to a still unusual but possible philological craft: the craft of a digital philology, which in turn foregrounds practices that are not at all unusual for philology, such as counting, comparing, ordering, and structuring. Unlike other methods of philology, this craft is usually interdisciplinary and collaborative: Digital philological work on data, on corpora, takes place in social and interactive forms in the humanities, in which the collective working group character is in the foreground.

This idea, which Heike Gfrereis (Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach) and Peer Trilcke (Theodor Fontane Archive, Potsdam) took up as an example and exhibition preparation in 2018 in the (computer) philological hackathon The Fontane Code, is to be pursued further in a poetry hackathon that complements the Marbach exhibition Hölderlin, Celan und die Sprachen der Poesie: Interdisciplinary teams from philology, information science, computational linguistics, and design will conduct digital analyses using curated data on the poems of Schiller, Mörike, Hölderlin, and Celan, discuss their methods and results with one another, and attempt interpretations of these results.

There is no fixed question - only a space of shared questioning: What is poetry if we look at it as an accumulation of data, process it, analyze it? What structures, what patterns can be discerned? What do we do with these - what can they tell us about poetry, what can we tell about it? And, that would be one of our hypotheses: Is poetry more resistant to typical computer philological or computer linguistic routines than other literary genres? What potential for knowledge then lies in this resistance?