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Dr. Svenja Guhr

Postdoctoral Researcher

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Bellwether Postdoctoral Scholar, UC Berkeley School of Information

Founding member of fortext lab, Technical University of Darmstadt

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Research Interests: Modern German Literature, Comparative Literature, 18th-21st Century, Gender and Feminism Studies, Sensual Experiences in and through literary text(s) with a focus on Sound and Loudness

Short Introduction

As a multilingual scholar with 7+ years of experience in computational linguistics and literary studies, machine learning, and multilingual digital text analysis (English, German, French, Italian), thinking responsibility and privacy by design, I bring expertise in: natural language processing, language data collection, curation and analysis, data annotation, data quality assessment, taxonomy design, and team management, combined with excellent verbal, editorial, analytical, and teamwork skills.

News

Next Career Step: Postdoc at UCB iSchool

On September 2, I started a new position at UC Berkeley School of Information. For the next two years, I will live and work in the San Francisco Bay Area, supporting Prof. David Bamman and the Bamman Group in their exciting research on computational literary studies and cultural analytics.

Acceptance to the DHd 2026 Annual Conference

I look forward to seeing you at the annual DHd conference in Vienna, 23.02.-27.02. Check out our paper: Guhr, S. & Mahlberg, M., "Soundful Dickens. The Narrative Function of Sounds in Dickens’s Fictional Worlds".

Publication of Our Paper in JCLS 4(1)

Wrapping up the LitLab project on the detection of domestic space, Jessica Monaco, Alex Sherman, Mark Algee-Hewitt, and I published our article "Making BERT Feel at Home. Modelling Domestic Space in 19th-Century British and Irish Fiction" with JCLS. You can find it at: 10.48694/jcls.4164.

Upcoming or Latest Talks and Workshops

January 2026

  • 28.01., 14:00 (PST)
    "Sound and Suspense in the Men Made in America Novels", Talk at the Stanford Literary Lab, USA

February 2026

  • 25.02., 9:00 (CET)
    "Soundful Dickens. The Narrative Function of Sounds in Dickens's Fictional Worlds", joint talk with Prof. Michaela Mahlberg at the annual DHd conference at the University of Vienna, Austria

April 2026

  • 20.-24.04.
    Invited Talk and CATMA Workshop in the Department of English at the University of Wyoming, USA

May 2026

  • 20.05.
    Guest Lecture on "Annotation Guidelines" at Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany

Svenja presenting
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Discover how sound is represented in German-language fiction and explore new possibilities through computational analysis.

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Explore research projects on the annotation and automated recognition of sound and space in 19th-century literature using digital methods.