Kafka's data processing

Andreas Kilcher and Eva Edelmann-Ohler

Cooperation project with the universities of Princeton, Siegen, Regensburg and Weimar.

The basis of the cooperation project is the profound changes that the digital media upheaval - and in particular the developments of hypertext and the world wide web - has brought about for the formation of theory, methodology and the organisation of research in literary studies: from the sharpened perception of its subject matter in terms of media theory and history, to the new possibilities of storing, presenting and making available its results, to new forms of organisation of the research process itself. As the first and at the same time independent phase of a comprehensive project - working title: "Kafka's Data Processing" - Kafka's Virtual Media Library aims first of all at a systematic indexing of the intermedial context of Kafka's work and at its annotated presentation in the medium of a database-based hypertext. The cooperation of leading American, German and Czech scholars should make it possible to productively link the three most important national traditions or complexes of Kafka research: to relate their most important results to each other, to contrast different national readings of a modern classic and to formulate new common tasks. The intended results of the collaboration - the development and utilisation of a highly complex work horizon of literary modernism on a digital basis as well as a research volume that summarises, comments on and problematises this electronic supplement to print literature - have a clear innovative character in terms of literary history and media practice. Beyond its own completed horizon, the project is also conceived as an exploratory phase and starting point for a more extensive and comprehensive project entitled "The Kafka Hypertext".