Dr. Svenja Guhr
Postdoctoral Researcher
Bellwether Postdoctoral Scholar, UC Berkeley School of Information
Founding member of fortext lab, Technical University of Darmstadt
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
Svenja Guhr is a Bellwether Postdoctoral Scholar at the UC Berkeley School of Information, where her research bridges applied natural language processing and literary studies. She focuses on the operationalization of literary phenomena, developing systematic methods to measure concepts like “sound,” “loudness,” and “suspense” in multilingual fiction. Previously a researcher at the Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany, and a visiting scholar at the Stanford Literary Lab, she now leads a project investigating the modeling of suspense in American and British short fiction.
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 I School, UCB
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".
Acceptance to NLP4DH Workshop at ACL 2026
Super excited to present my paper "Between Whispers and Screams: Loudness Standard Deviation as a Proxy for Explicit Content Detection in US Romance Novels" at the NLP4DH Workshop at ACL 2026 in San Diego in July. I will be in San Diego from July 1st to 5th. Code, Data, and Paper Preprint can be found on my GitHub: SvenjaGuhr/Explicit_Content_Detection.
Upcoming or Latest Talks and Workshops
April 2026
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15.-22.04.
Visit to the Department of English and Institute for Humanities at the University of Wyoming, USA -
20.04.
Participation in the conference "Humanities for AI," a session as part of the University of Wyoming Science Institute's Annual Research Symposium -
21.04., 10:00 (MDT)
CATMA Workshop at the William Robertson Coe Library, University of Wyoming, USA -
21.04., 19:00 (MDT)
Guest Lecture on "From Whispers to Explosions: Modeling Sound in Literary Fiction" in the "Qualitative Methods" Class, University of Wyoming, USA -
22.04., 11:00 (MDT)
"Whispers, Alarms, and Heartbeats: A Sound Analysis of the Men Made in America Series", invited talk in the "Introduction to NLP" class, Computer Science Department, University of Colorado Boulder, USA
May 2026
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19.05., 18:00 (CEST)
Invited Talk on "Who Makes Noise in Fiction? A Computational Approach to Character and Ambient Sound in Literature" in the DH-Colloquium at the University of Freiburg, Germany -
20.05., 11:40 (CEST)
Guest Lecture on "Annotation Guidelines" at the Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany -
26.05., 10:00 (CEST)
Invited Talk on "Listening to Fiction: Tracing Sound and Loudness in Narrative" in the Colloquium "LiLi revisited: Digitale Schnittstellenforschung zwischen Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik" at the University of Bielefeld, Germany -
28.-29.05.
Participation in the 5th Annual Conference of Computational Literary Studies (CCLS) with Poster Presentation at the University of Potsdam, Germany
July 2026
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01.-07.07.
Participation in the NLP4DH Workshop at ACL 2026 in San Diego, USA
