Conférence de Manuel Burghardt (Universität Leipzig)

Our center is very happy to host Dr. Manuel Burghardt (Universität Leipzig) for two conferences the week of March 16th, the first one on Tuesday 17 March at 10.30am on the Université de Montréal campus for a talk entitled « Tracing the Kafkaesque: From Computational Stylometry to Empirical Reception Studies »:

Franz Kafka’s distinctive writing style has been extensively studied in literary studies and remains a central reason for his enduring international reception and canonical status. This talk explores how digital humanities methods can contribute to a new understanding of what constitutes Kafka’s stylistic uniqueness. It begins with a review of existing stylometric research that quantitatively compares Kafka’s works with those of other authors, showing how computational approaches model lexical, syntactic, and structural features associated with his prose. Moving beyond purely text-immanent analysis, the talk argues that the “Kafkaesque” should not be understood solely as a stylistic property of texts, but rather as a phenomenon that emerges in processes of reception. From this perspective, the Kafkaesque unfolds in the interaction between text and reader, often characterized by ambiguity, indeterminacy, and various forms of interpretive gaps. This shift in focus poses a methodological challenge: how can computational methods capture and analyze phenomena of reception that go beyond the textual surface? To address this question, the talk will present approaches from empirical reception studies that make use of large collections of freely available reception data from the social web. By bringing together stylometry and large-scale reception analysis, the talk positions computational methods not merely as analytical tools, but as instruments of theoretical reflection. It demonstrates how digital humanities methods can help us to better understand literary style and its broader cultural development.

Manuel Burghardt is Full Professor for Computational Humanities at the Institute for Computer Science at the University of Leipzig. He is responsible for the Bachelor’s and Master’s programs in Digital Humanities and serves as speaker of the Forum of Digital Humanities in Leipzig (FDHL). He also heads the Digital Lab at the Research Center Global Dynamics (ReCentGlobe). His research combines computational methods and cultural analysis, with extensive experience in third-party funded projects on a wide range of topics. These include the digitization and analysis of historical finance newspapers, computational approaches to investigate strategies of canon formation, the computer-aided study of narrative patterns in German television news, and the analysis of visual culture in large corpora of historical children’s book illustrations. His current research interests include game studies, computational literary studies with a focus on remediation and intertextuality, and computational environmental humanities, especially large-scale analysis of visual archives.

Ce contenu a été mis à jour le 10 mars 2026 à 7 h 50 min.