Dear digital humanists,

We are pleased to announce the program for the "Early Modern Climate Cultures Colloquium" for the summer semester 2026, focusing on data-driven approaches to early modern texts and climate discourses. 

The interdisciplinary research colloquium “Early Modern Climate Cultures”, which is organised by the Emmy Noether Research Group “Traces of the ‘Little Ice Age’ in Early Modern German Literature (LitLIA)”, is dedicated to the presentation and discussion of current research in the field of Environmental Humanities. A particular focus is placed geographically on Europe and historically on the early modern period. 

In the upcoming summer semester 2026, we will especially focus on the use of data and databases in researching early modern texts and climate discourses: How can literary and historical scholarship integrate quantitative methods into the study of historical climate cultures? How do you build a database that is suitable for environmental, historical, literary research? What are the potential pitfalls of data-based approaches to early modern sources? 

 

The colloquium will take place online. If you are interested in attending, please register at: van.de.loecht@uni-muenster.de or marvin.asmussen@uni-muenster.de. The sessions will be held in English.

Dates: 

 

23.04.2026, 16:00 (CET): Sylvia Brockstieger, Rebecca Hirt (Heidelberg/Karlsruhe): From Material Text to Digital Data: Creating the Writing Calendar Database

 

21.05.2026, 16:00 (CET): Siv Gøril Brandtzæg (Trondheim): Songs on Screen: The Making of a Database

 

02.06.2026, 14:00 (CET): Andrew Pettegree (St. Andrews): The Universal Short Title Catalogue and the Perils of Big Data – joint event with Book Studies Münster 

 

25.06.2026, 16:00 (CET): Rüdiger Glaser (Freiburg): Climate Data Analysis from the Little Ice Age to the Modern Warming

 

02.07.2026, 16:00 (CET): Jöran Landschoff, Carolin Schwegler, Leyla Rommel (Cologne/Bremen): Close Reading/Distant Reading: Approaching Climate Discourses in Large Text Corpora 

Best regards,

Marvin Asmussen